Vier von vier (four of four) brings to a close in an unexpected way the painter Thomas Huber’s project for the Pictet headquarters. Three paintings had already been commissioned for the second floor hall when the possibility was raised of completing the group with a final canvas that would be hung in one of the meeting rooms.
The paintings of interiors conclude, as it were, with a depiction of the building’s architectural envelope, the subject of the fourth picture. In this way the artist creates a circulating movement between the inside and the outside, as in a fantasised passage through the looking glace. Viewers are invited to shift their point of view and discover the other side of the proposed images. It is the individual’s job to recall the large-scale paintings hanging in the hall, mentally reassemble them and wonder how they fit with the view of the façade.
As the artist writes in the accompanying text that completes his project for Pictet & Cie: “In a room adjacent to the hall where the three paintings are hanging opposite one another, a fourth painting is found. It is smaller than the others and, unlike them, depicts an outside view of a house. The house stands beneath a bright midday sun shining directly overhead. No human being is seen, no automobile in the street out front. The neighbouring houses are silent. They clearly seem to have been built before the one in the middle. You notice that the windows of the house, just like the windows of the interior spaces, are not framed. You imagine then that this house reproduces the exterior view of the architecture we have seen from the inside in the three large-format paintings – as the proportions of the windows and doors and their arrangement allow us to suppose. The view through certain windows reveals the same crosspieces seen in front of the house in the painting of the exterior. The fourth painting brings together the three much larger ones and makes them disappear in the black openings of its windows.”
The paintings of interiors conclude, as it were, with a depiction of the building’s architectural envelope, the subject of the fourth picture. In this way the artist creates a circulating movement between the inside and the outside, as in a fantasised passage through the looking glace. Viewers are invited to shift their point of view and discover the other side of the proposed images. It is the individual’s job to recall the large-scale paintings hanging in the hall, mentally reassemble them and wonder how they fit with the view of the façade.
As the artist writes in the accompanying text that completes his project for Pictet & Cie: “In a room adjacent to the hall where the three paintings are hanging opposite one another, a fourth painting is found. It is smaller than the others and, unlike them, depicts an outside view of a house. The house stands beneath a bright midday sun shining directly overhead. No human being is seen, no automobile in the street out front. The neighbouring houses are silent. They clearly seem to have been built before the one in the middle. You notice that the windows of the house, just like the windows of the interior spaces, are not framed. You imagine then that this house reproduces the exterior view of the architecture we have seen from the inside in the three large-format paintings – as the proportions of the windows and doors and their arrangement allow us to suppose. The view through certain windows reveals the same crosspieces seen in front of the house in the painting of the exterior. The fourth painting brings together the three much larger ones and makes them disappear in the black openings of its windows.”
