A pair of small-format artist's books, conceived as two visual sequences bound together by tension, attraction, and delay.
Like a syncopated movement, the project unfolds by placing its weight on what is usually left aside. What appears fragile, delayed, or understated becomes the place where the rhythm begins to breath. Each volume contains thirteen square paintings, all built from the same restrained visual syntax: a fragile white border, a horizontal band of yellow sun, a colored ground, and a central figure. This constant framework acts like a fixed measure, while slight shifts allow the emphasis to fall elsewhere. The sequence insists one beat too many – as exposure – keeping the tempo open. At first glance, the pictorial language appears elementary, almost playful, recalling the logic of simple gestures. With time and repeated return, however, this apparent ease reveals its depth, as the images begin to slow with hesitation, and accumulated attention.
In DUO, nature holds the image. A single, solitary tree stands at the center of every composition. Its presence is quiet and vulnerable, holding the picture together through stillness. The repetition slows the gaze, allowing respiration, distance, and a form of attentive surrender.
In DUEL, the movement folds inward to the artist's studio, a space shaped by culture, effort, and strain. Elements appear contained, wavering, sometimes barely held within the frame. Here, repetition becomes pressure. The frame tightens; the gesture weakens. What persists is the effort to remain.
Between the two books, a relational dynamic takes shape – an attraction grounded in imbalance. Like a paradoxical form of love, DUO DUEL draws its force from what yields: from hesitation, exposure, and the moment where structure admits its own fragility. Emphasis settles on the off-beat, where something new arises. Intimate in scale and precise in construction, DUO DUEL is an object shaped by wordless desire and chosen weakness. It invites repeated handling and return. Its power lies in the redistribution of weight – in letting the fragile carry the rhythm. What moves here is quiet and decisive: a pulse born from letting go, touching the eye, and, gently, the heart.
Agnès Wyler (born 1961) is a Swiss artist based in Zurich. Her multidisciplinary practice explores time, transformation, and emotional memory through poetic works in ceramics, drawing, painting, collage, and fragmentary texts—probing the shifting boundaries between dream and reality.
