Yves Scherer: Another Day in Paradise

Hope. Beauty. Denial. Action. Home. 

We usually think about these various things at different times, different ways—they belong to different spheres, different discussions. What if we thought of them as just different words for the same thing? 

The older and more accomplished that the Swiss-born, New-York-based artist Yves Scherer gets, the more he has been embracing, a fact beautifully borne out by his latest show of sculptures and paintings at the Journal Gallery. 

Of course, at first glance the show itself might appear to be going in two different directions. In the front room is a quiet and reflective statuary court, a gathering of serene, Giacometti-slender sculptures of meditative figures in dusty pale pink and white onyx (accented by a flower-nibbling bronze goat and a couple endearing poppets). Meanwhile, in the back room, a color riot is underway—an overgrowth of small, rough, vibrant paintings hung salon-style, a post-impressionist garden of green-earth grounds, blurry pastel washes and yellow-red poppies of color, all going pell-mell to seed. 

But if one room seems pensive and the other expressive, they’re both part of Scherer’s belief in what, in today’s art world, is often seen as a dangerously radical idea: optimism. 

“I wanted this show to have a joyous feeling,” says Scherer, who chose the title “Another Day in Paradise” for his new Los Angeles show not to sound cynical but to reflect a steady, daily sense of positivity. “I’m in a happy place in my life right now and I like to make people feel the same.” 

It might sound odd to hear optimism described as radical in a world where radical usually signifies critique and deconstruction, if not outright demolition. But strictly speaking, a shift that’s radical—from the Latin radix, for root—is a change that happens at the root. 

Over the years, Scherer’s approach to making art has changed quietly but at the root. “I used to be a more unhappy person, used to think about things a lot more,” he says. “I had this Italian boss once who was very into the Chinese philosophy of Daoism of not thinking much, just moving always trying to forward. The world moves by positive action rather than talking about negative things, I think.”

Both the beautiful pink onyx and the earthen greens spring from this impulse, which for Scherer has been amplified in recent years with the birth of a son and daughter (whose presence can be glimpsed in the show’s two childlike sculptures) and the desire to create a positive space that keeps their giddy laughter inside and the world’s ugly reality out. 

But the clearest expression of Scherer’s spirit can be seen in the show’s most monumental work: a ten-foot aluminum work that displays a ruined Greek-hero statue, beheaded and disabled by time and vandalism, but held upright and resilient by a massive dandelion propping up his half-calf and weary spine. 

Even maligned as a weed, the dandelion makes a wonderful metaphor for the power that nature has to bring life, change and joy to a ruin, an apt and hopeful image not just for post-inferno Los Angeles but for a world besieged by cynicism and destruction. 

Similarly, as much as optimism is maligned as the uncultivated weed of human thought, it’s hard to dispute that it has its appeal and place. Scherer’s work is a strong argument for both art and optimism having an apotropaic power—a term for rituals and charms (like the evil eye) with the power to ward off evil. It may be naïve to trust in such things to avoid bad luck, but any number of studies suggest that optimists are generally healthier and happier and are both more creative and more successful at problem-solving than those who opt out, so to speak. A different kind of flower power, perhaps, but one with a heady bouquet. 

David Colman