Elias Jocher: silvery gazes

Through sculptural installations and object series, Elias Jocher (*2001, Italy)
establishes a formal language in which ornament, body, and landscape merge into surreal compositions. A training in printmaking and his studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna under Brigitte Kowanz and Jakob Lena Knebl shaped his interest in both technological and artisanal production methods. Building on this foundation, Elias Jocher works with a wide range of techniques in a hybrid process that bridges the digital and the analog. This methodology extends to the conceptual level of his works, becoming a metaphor for ambiguity and complexity.

The starting point for the work is the grotesque as an ornamental form of antiquity. It represents a historically developed formal principle and can also be read as a conceptual model for ambivalence. It acts by linking supposed opposites. Originally found in Roman wall paintings, the concept of the “grotta” (cave) developed in many different ways, leading to the idea of the contradictory, the surreal, the monstrous, and the uncanny. As a figure of thought, the grotesque represents a place in between.

This tension is reflected in the materials themselves: concrete, made from minerals and shaped through technological processes, meets tin, recycled from historical objects and culturally charged. The production begins with analog sketches, which are then translated into a digital archive of sculptures. From this archive, forms are continuously revisited, reconfigured, and returned to physical material, allowing each work to evolve through the interplay of handcraft and digital modeling. The resulting objects occupy space as part of an open, fragmentary narrative, creating a landscape that is both precise and enigmatic, familiar yet unsettling.

silvery gazes expands upon these artistic investigations, deepening the interplay between the familiar and the uncanny, where the beautiful intertwines with the grotesque. This ambivalence unfolds into a poetic, narrative language that refuses resolution and remains held in suspension.