For his first exhibition at the Félix Frachon Gallery, Mathieu Zurstrassen proposes « 528Hz. «
He elaborates the essential of his practice on « the mise en abîme » of the belief, and in the form of performance, questions our relationship to the invisible and the « intimate ».
In a context halfway between the laboratory and a celebration, the installation « 528Hz » is played in several sequences.
The first is that of Fortune Cookies, small perishable cookies of current and symbolic consumption. It stimulates them via radio waves at the stable frequency of 528 Hz. In the alternative (post-war) culture, this frequency would have the property of healing, or even of repairing the DNA. It would even be considered as the frequency of love. Matthieu Zurstrassen seizes these elements and questions: Could this frequency be able to transform simple biscuits into contemporary amulets? And what properties will we, in turn, assign to it?
There is no need to control the veracity of the protocol. What is happening is happening in us. The challenge is not that, one way or another, Fortune Cookie is really transformed, but that we project ourselves in our desires. It reactivates therefore this unspoken belief that we all project on objects, memories or messages. He thus controls chance by giving it a particular path. These Hertzian frequencies can be seen as the means by which our fantasies become embodied and incarnate into this little popular biscuit. The Fortune Cookie thus becomes the catalyst for this invisible transformation.
Then in a logic just as offbeat, he proposes in a second time, a lottery, a chance which one would still want the elected. Under its glass bell, the biscuit « preserved » from any influence other than those of the waves, becomes a lust. And the simple fact of playing gives the object a new status: that of a unique fantasy object. Matthieu Zurtrassen, in posing this device, almost simultaneously induces a form of hope and amplifies the belief. Under a technical and scientific aesthetic, he fuels the engine of the imaginary whose sentence is the message slipped inside the biscuit.
Matthieu Zurtrassen likes balances which do not invade any of the parties. He makes a point of honor in being sure that the process is complete and for everyone. For if we find ourselves losing at the lottery, we are still winners of a crushed cake, such as an allegory of an unrealized wish.