'SHOOTING STAR' by Julian-Jakob Kneer at Blue Velvet Projects, Zurich

♬ …DING DING DONG I invite you to look in the mirror, to embrace the man who laughs
DING DING DONG come in my shelter, come in my burrow, there’s  nothing to be afraid of
DING DING DONG let’s contemplate my scars and your flowing wound
DING DING DONG give your eyes and give your mind to my reality which is in a perpetual invention
DING DING DONG I am a SHOOTING STAR… ♬

Blue Velvet Projects is excited to announce SHOOTING STAR, a solo exhibition by Berlin-based Swiss artist Julian-Jakob Kneer. Through  conversation with the curatorial duo Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou, the artist developed a new body of works and narratives of a dark doppelganger. Set within Kneer’s trilogy devoted to an antihero figure, SHOOTING STAR investigates and presents its mental antechamber. Exploring the monstrous part of celebrity culture, neurotic narcissism as well as the definition and the destruction of the self, SHOOTING STAR deploys ambiguous signifiers infused by a morbid eroticism through new cinematic installations and sculptures. He has been drawing the contours of a character, one could say an alter ego or a projection, whose apparitions are always fragmentary, unstable and deformed. This character without a name is both the star and the fan, the source of envy and the repository of resentment. He had a rib removed to suck his own dick. He is dormant in everyone and apparent only in some.

How did he manage to look at himself in the face? Like P, he had a taste for exhibitionism which, depending on his state of disinhibition, was either shy or baroque. Like him, he paid unreasonable attention to his clothes. He  was an abstraction, a consumer entity with all the attributes of a human being – flesh, blood, skin, hair – but with a level of a depersonalization which was so deep that his normal capacity to feel compassion has been slowly annihilated. He cherished business cards printed on “RAL 7016” colored paper and the Garamond font. He appreciated having a reservation at Pastels, Dorsia or Kronenhalle for a nonchalant Sunday night. When he was too bored, he loved to compose nature mortes on dissection tables with Biologique Recherche creams. He was the kind of guy who based his persona on American Psycho, he was a Tik-Tok Incel. Once, he said, he was in an American military base in Osaka and he didn’t feel an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2. Basically, he didn’t feel anything. He was tout simplement pas là.

It is said that he could have been kidnapped by the Comprachicos, one of the vilest organisations that Europe has counted. Composed of marginal people with nothing left to lose , this cowardly organization without language or religion specialized in human trafficking. These virtuoso torturers were sculptors of human flesh. Cutting off the limbs of living men, they were said to be street surgeons. But it was their specialisation in child abduction that made their reputation. They not only kidnapped them, but also abused them to turn these bodies into phenomena. Some of them were then sold on the black market after having had their faces removed or lacerated. Through mutilation one can make a mask out of a face. But in our case it is said that an indelible and protean scar streaks his face and that he tries by all cosmetic means to hide it. Marked like an animal at the slaughterhouse, he had become a rare commodity for lovers of adulterated flesh.

Tabloids and celebrity culture were his only natural food. This little hobby was time consuming. Sometimes, he loved to play the bogeyman-twin in Placebo outfits. Demi, Kanye, Hailey or the video-diary of Ricardo Lopez filming himself in his room, obese and haggard, selfhating to the point of suicide and preparing an acid explosive for Bjork’s face constituted his notable video-regime. The peak of the ceremony was supposed to unify them through death. A suicide love letter in the form of a bomb. If this attack had been committed she would have to call Doctor Buffalo Bill. The anatomical cabinet of Doctor Bill was specialised in human skin masks. Made principally with the skin of the back, thighs and shoulder blades of victims butchered, its luxury masks had the reputation to be extremely delicate. The most sophisticated product he had in stock was the Kaposi, a mask that still supported the trace of a skin disease, or the spouting on the epidermis of thousands of small red balls and tiny secretions of haemoglobin.

Sometimes he buries himself in his room and listens to Piece of Me by Britney Spears. It reminded him of Luka Rocco Icarus Magnotta, getting caught for checking his mugshot in a Späti in Berlin. When he decided to redesign his room, he went all for the horror-house-cum-alpha-BROthel-boutique-chic. Another major influence was Klaus Biensenbach’s deco. A single bed, a mattress and a desk. Klaus once told the Times that he hated design. This is what his character is best suited for, an empty space. He is a shooting star. He can project the most abject scenarios and heal his wounds there. We all want a place to go, an emptiness, a Gregor Schneider-like mental void. An antechamber for Kammerspiel fantasies.

— Pierre-Alexandre Mateos & Charles Teyssou