Interview

Vanessa Disler and Fabian Flückiger

Vanessa Disler’s « Euphoric Recall »

Exhibition view: Vanessa Disler, Euphoric Recall, Kunstforum Baloise, Basel, 2024, courtesy the artist and Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels/Zurich. Photo: Gina Folly.

Exhibition view: Vanessa Disler, Euphoric Recall, Kunstforum Baloise, Basel, 2024, courtesy the artist and Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels/Zurich. Photo: Gina Folly.

Fabian Flückiger: Vanessa, your current solo exhibition is anything but conventional. Authorship itself is put into question through the presence of a doppelganger. But let’s take it from the top. At its center is the titular installation: an expansive bar constructed from modular elements commonly used in film sets. You've adapted these materials to your needs, clearly referencing cinema. How did this immersive work come to life?

Vanessa Disler: My starting point for the exhibition was Paul Schrader's film Light Sleeper (1992). Several aesthetic, thematic, and historical elements attracted me. On one level, I was intrigued by the character of the protagonist, John Latour (played by Willem Dafoe), an aging high-end drug dealer who longs to escape the business of selling his wares to Manhattan's elite and become a writer. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that he cannot reorient himself — caught in an unfolding midlife crisis and entangled with a criminal Swiss art collector. The feeling that “the party is over” permeates every scene. 

Primarily shot at night, the film is highly stylized and features Neo-Expressionist paintings from the 1980s, including paintings by Francesco Clemente, David Salle, and Sandro Chia. There is an interesting parallel between the protagonist's mental state and the paintings in the film, which reflect a turning point in the early ’90s when the macho heroics of Neo-Expressionist painting — and the genre itself — began to lose their lustre. 

Another aspect of the film that resonated with me was the various bars Latour visited, such as the now-defunct Palio Bar in New York, which were adorned with monumental murals. I was interested in isolating and recontextualizing the idea of the bar as a stand-alone movie set. I also wanted to work with this subject because of the historical role bars have had in modern painting — both as subject and setting. And of course, bars have always been places where artists and writers converge at night to debate, gossip, and have transformative experiences.

Vanessa Disler, research plate showing Light Sleeper film stills, writing by Martin Disler, Euphoric Recall bar installation, 2025, courtesy the artist and Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels/Zurich. Photo: Vanessa Disler.

Vanessa Disler, research plate showing Palio Bar New York with painting by Sandro Chia, 2025, courtesy the artist and Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels/Zurich. Photo: Vanessa Disler.

FF: Your work is powerful in the way it seamlessly weaves different elements together. Above, you spoke about translating an atmospheric element from film into an installation – the “party’s over” mood resonates throughout your bar installation. It surfaces in your critique of macho heroism in Neo-Expressionist painting, and in the emotional undercurrents of a waning democratic era, hinted at by a few newspaper clippings scattered across the bar. Let’s zoom in on painting in the 1980s and ’90s. What was the status quo of Neo-Expressionism during that time, and where do you see the missed potential that you are now picking up as a painter today?

VD: Neo-Expressionism emerged as a reaction against the analytical approach of Minimalism and Conceptualism, which had dominated previous decades. It marked a return to figurative painting, often grandiose in scale, with a focus on mythological and existential themes. The movement dominated the art market in the ’80s and was almost entirely made up of white men. While much of the work made during this period was oversized, overwrought, garish, and heavy-handed, many artists were also producing works that explored interesting formal experiments and themes, which contemporary painting discourse has unfairly written off as "bad painting." Specifically, Francisco Clemente and his approach to figuration and colour, Julian Schnabel's early work on tarps and plates, and also Martin Disler's early work that focuses a lot on drawing and language as a foundation. 

Of course, much of the pushback against this type of work had to do with the market, but I also think the direction in which the “Neo-Expressionist” project in painting was headed played a significant role in its negative reception. Specifically, the idea of the heroic solo white male author of history returning to a proto-historical form of painting — and the refusal to engage with the contemporary realities of the day — contributed to the backlash.

My interest in revisiting this moment and its outmodedness has been to see what could be repurposed and reconfigured. My interest in this moment is also a more personal one, with the figure of the Swiss painter Martin Disler, who is a distant relative. Like many artists lumped into umbrella movements, such as Abstract and Neo-Expressionism, Martin Disler's work doesn't seem to fit neatly into these categories. From what I understand, he also fought against being associated with them. 

Martin Disler, Ohne Titel, 1984, Baloise Corporate Collection.

FF: One of the qualities of great painters is the ability to critically distinguish themselves from a particular period in the history of painting, while also drawing from it. In your case, the figure of Martin Disler serves both as a reference to the history of painting and as a means of biographical self-reflection. In this dual role, Disler becomes a kind of heteronym, bridging sociological and artistic points of reference. Through him, you analyze your brushstrokes as you make them, reflecting on who is symbolically holding the brush — both in terms of your socialization and your evolution as a painter. This approach is remarkable, blending psychological elements with aspects of the history of painting, as well as literary, cinematic, and painting theory elements. Can we think of Martin Disler — whose works from the Baloise Corporate Collection are included in your exhibition at the Kunstforum Baloise — not only as a literal figure but also a semi-fictitious one? How would you describe his influence?

VD: I see Martin Disler and his legacy as a distorted mirror or doppelganger to address questions of art history, subjectivity, and inherited histories — whether artistic, cultural, or familial. Our relationship functions as a posthumous collaboration, though it is not entirely consensual. At times, I am not sure if he is haunting me or I’m haunting him [laughs]. Without a doubt, I am interfering with his legacy. I have always thought of painting as a vehicle for time travel. With every mark you make or witness, you are communing with the past or the future. As a viewer, you are experiencing an act created in the past — an imprint of a specific moment in time, capturing a desire to leave a mark or touch. This could be seen as a capturing of a desire or an attempt to speak. 

FF: Family relationships are never consensual [laughs]. In your engagement with both historical and personal heritage — and the question of how to navigate this as an artist — the issue of responsibility inevitably arises. I am interested in how you understand responsibility — in your own actions and the heritage you produce as an artist — particularly in relation to the exhibition title “Euphoric Recall”, which addresses a certain irresponsibility in dealing with the past by glorifying it and inverting its negative aspects. 

VD: It's funny that you say family relationships are never consensual. This is how I felt during art school, in the mid-2000s, toward the canon of abstract painting. I studied in Vancouver, a city without major museums, so my only access to historical paintings — aside from flying to New York — was through monographs and the occasional travelling exhibition. I felt I had inherited a history that had, for the most part, ignored or written out female, non-Western, and POC abstract painters. My approach to this was a sort of inverted Oedipal revenge fantasy. Of course, over the past 15 years, the canon has been significantly challenged and expanded — but my attitude remains the same: a mix of veneration for the history of painting, paired with skepticism and humour. I think humour is a highly underrated tactic.

Regarding responsibility, art-making, for me, is a place that takes you somewhere completely unexpected. Making art is like being in the dark, on your hands and knees, grasping for an object buried in the sand. You can feel the object's outline, but you do not know what it is — you must keep blindly searching until some understanding of it emerges.

In the process of making, the work tells you what it needs and establishes its own internal logic. I believe this logic should be valued just as much as the initial idea or conceptual framework that spawned it. In a sense, a kind of double or parallel consciousness emerges through the act of creation.

FF: Your “Oedipal revenge fantasies” concerning your familial and institutional socialization as an artist highlight how deeply you intertwine psychological and art historical realities. It appears to be a process of reflection on — and emancipating yourself from — the very conditions that have shaped you as an artist. It’s a form of intelligent liberation that doesn't entirely discard the elements of the past. The title of the new bar and exhibition, “Euphoric Recall”, is particularly intriguing in this context. By using the language of a psychological diagnosis, you address the pathological trivialisation of the past. It seems to me that you're advocating for a more responsible approach to history — whether private, art-historical, or political. How do you see this approach materialised in the Bar installation?

VD: The title refers to the concept of euphoric recall, a physiological condition characterized by memory distortion and euphoria, in which only the good times — and never the bad — are remembered, particularly in the context of substance abuse, and concerning the legacy of art history, neo-expressionism, and nostalgia. 

Various objects throughout the bar hint at the highs and lows of a long night out. Pills are scattered across the scratched aluminium countertop, while half-drunk cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon lie around, along with cigarette stubs, lost keys, and peanut shells. At first glance, this appears to be the typical detritus of an after-hours party or bar. However, upon closer inspection, additional elements emerge: unopened bills, copies of the New York Times from the Brexit and Trump elections, half-completed crossword puzzles, cash stuffed in envelopes, dice, a rat trap with cheese on the bar counter, and old pin-up playing cards from the 1960s. 

Drawing on the objects found in Vanitas, a genre of still life painting (such as decaying fruit, games, half blown-out candles, and reflective surfaces such as metal plates and half filled glasses), I wanted to create a memento mori where displays of excess, death, fate, fortune, and the passage of time are intertwined. Aside from the objects I mentioned, I included reproductions of Martin Disler's drawings and handwriting, as well as film stills from the dive bar featured in Light Sleeper. Clementines, which visually signify prostitutes from the Belle Époque, are scattered about, evoking Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-82). 

With this constellation of objects, I was concerned with combining different and opposing forces, from the personal to the cultural, themes of memory, and the passage of time.

Exhibition view: Vanessa Disler, Euphoric Recall, Kunstforum Baloise, Basel, 2024, courtesy the artist and Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels/Zurich. Photo: Gina Folly.

Exhibition view: Vanessa Disler, Euphoric Recall, Kunstforum Baloise, Basel, 2024, courtesy the artist and Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels/Zurich. Photo: Gina Folly.

FF: Your still life, or memento mori, is both spatial and accessible. As a visitor, you become part of it — psychologically and physically drawn into the installation and its artifacts. This immersive quality was highlighted during the vernissage when an art lover approached the installation and helped himself to a piece of sweaty, months-old cheese. The revolting taste abruptly shattered the trompe l'oeil illusion of the piece. Yet, it resulted in a wonderful anecdote: a testament to how your installation, with its layered dimensions of time and meaning, gave rise to a new, unintended reality.

The interview was conducted for the most part by email in March and April of 2025.