Fabian Oefner, a Swiss artist residing in New York, delves into the complex interplay among time, space and reality in his arts. © Fabian Oefner for Smalltalk
What is your background, and how did your journey as an artist begin?
(Fabian Oefner, Artist) So the journey began when I was a little kid. I remember putting scale model cars into the workbench, you know, the vise, and press them. Through that, I destroyed them. I was always fascinated by that project, something like, I don’t know, childish, but it remained with me all these years – this sense of destroying something, but also in the process of it, analysing it, and exploring what is happening with it. So that’s kind of the more poetic way of how I evolved as an artist. And in a sense, more the biographical way was that I started product design in Switzerland and was just always fascinated by different manufacturing processes. And in a sense, you can still see that in my art. It’s a lot about materials, texture, technology that I turn into art. So that’s kind of the short version of how I became an artist.
Please walk us through the process of creating your art series featuring exploded automobiles – I’m curious about thoughts and preparation involved.
(FO) The inspiration is a mix of two things. Firstly, it’s stemmed from some of the first money I made when I bought an old Volvo car and I wanted to restore it. To understand how certain components, like the fuel pump, were assembled, I looked at the diagrams of exploded views or drawings. There was something wrong with it and I needed to replace the part. Working on that car and examining those diagrams gave birth to the idea of basically recreating an exploded view with real parts, with a real car rather than just illustrations.
“The idea of stopping time combined with the illustrations of the exploded views gave me the idea to create a series where I create artificial moments in time.”
(FO) Secondly, I was also experimenting with high-speed photography at the same time. I was inspired by Professor Edgerton, who invented high-speed photography and demonstrated how moments like a drop falling into water or an apple being shot by a gun could be frozen in time. As I pursued these photographs, I built my own flashes to freeze time and take images similar to his, such as a drop of water falling into a bucket. The idea of stopping time combined with the illustrations of the exploded views gave me the idea to create a series where I create artificial moments in time. These moments appear real, they’re happened in the blink of an eye, yet they are entirely artificial creation of my creativity and my imagination.
“I think it’s our fascination in general, or my fascination with time, to understand it because it’s something very paradoxical.”
Why do you find the process of deconstructing objects and showcasing all their elements appealing in your artwork?
(FO) I think it’s our fascination in general, or my fascination with time, to understand it because it’s something very paradoxical. When you look at the work and you have that photograph in front of you, your mind tells you that this moment looks real – everything about it, the light, the pieces, they’re all real. And yet, you know that it can’t be real because the physics don’t work that way. So at that point, it becomes more like a metaphysical inquiry into what exactly time is how it is connected to reality. That’s my fascination with that series and a lot of the other series that I’m working on. It always has that component of time and how it becomes visible, either by removing it in a photograph, by stopping it, or by gradually slowing it, expanding it, or contracting it. It’s always about making time visible through my processes.
If there’s one inspiration for your work, would it be time?
(FO) Exactly. It would be time and how our perception of reality is shaped by it.
“Each component in the photograph has a story to tell, not only the whole image but each part of it has its own story. That’s what I love about it. That’s what I see when I look at the photograph.”
When you’re going through all those small components and every single details inside the car or any other project you are doing, by the end of each project, you’d have a really deep understanding of all the parts you’ve been working with. Was there any big surprises for you when you got to the bottom of all those details inside the projects?
(FO) That’s a good question. I always joke at the end of the project that I could do the mechanics’ job in the car as well as they do. But the beauty of it, especially working on these latest projects with the Riva and Lamborghini, is that all these objects have a lot of stories behind them because they were created decades ago, and each part has a story to tell. I remember talking to the mechanics, and they showed me this one specific carburetor of a Lamborghini Miura. They told me that they had to salvage it from a burned car that burned down in the middle of London, which belonged to a famous rock star. Since there were no parts left, they had to fix the badly damaged one. But they managed to do that, and now it lives on in another car. It’s kind of the beauty of it; each component in the photograph has a story to tell, not only the whole image but each part of it has its own story. That’s what I love about it. That’s what I see when I look at the photograph. I look at the specific part, and I remember photographing that one, talking with the mechanic about it, and he could tell me a story about it.
Your recent work with Riva, how did the idea first come about?
(FO) With Riva, it was really like, going back to my childhood. I remember spending summers in the south of France and seeing the river boats there laid ashore in the port, and I always thought they were such beautiful piece of art. This feeling stayed with me throughout my life, and then about two years ago, Bellini, who is the main restorer of Riva boats today, approached me and said, ‘We love your work., Would you ever be interested in doing a project together, working on a Riva?’
(FO) Of course, this was like a dream project for me. So we looked for the right opportunity when they were working on a restoration where they had to take apart the entire boat. When that happened, which was last fall, we worked together on photographing each piece of that boat, and the process was documented by Car & Vintage. Simply because I loved their work and I got to know Alberto, the head of Car & Vintage and we just seemed to have a similar dedication to detail and sense of beauty about these objects from the past. It was just a natural fit of Bellini providing the boat Car & Vintage accompanying the process of disintegrating it and photographing it. A perfect team.
How long does it take to create one?
(FO) So the actual work, the real man-hours that you have to put in, are maybe around 200 of actual physical labour. However, the whole process usually starts way in advance, typically a year or two beforehand. During this time, it’s about ensuring the parts are available and coming up with the sketches. Before I begin each photograph, I create a sketch to understand what the final image needs to look like. This helps me to determine which parts are relevant and which are not as important. By the time I start the photograph, I have a pretty good idea of what the final image will look like in my mind. I’ve been working with the object for months, whether it’s a car or something else, so I know it inside and out. The whole process takes about one to two years.
I find your artworks are very science driven. What is the relationship between art and science for you?
(FO) That’s a good observation because I’m just a very curious person about a lot of things, from objects like the Rivas, Lamborghinis, and other cars, to phenomena like the Northern Lights or how magnetism works. And art, for me, is just my vehicle or, whatever you want to call it, to explore all these different things. From an early age on, I engaged in activities where I explored, for example, magnetism by playing around with magnets and taking photographs of them. And all of a sudden, I had a series of interesting photographs coming out of it. The relationship between art and science, to me, is that they both are essentially trying to understand the world that we live in a bit better. They do it from different angles; art may focus more on the emotional aspect while science approaches it from a more rational, data-driven perspective. But at the end of the da, it’s about the same thing. By combining the two to explore scientific phenomenon, it gives you an even wider perspective on the world.
