Combining stop-motion animation of plasticine and paint, the artist’s incarnation of a lemon and a series of tragicomic events, Klodin Erb’s The Sweet Lemon Ballad offers a humorous and unconventional approach to the classical genre of Still Life and its existence beyond its pictorial tradition.

Aoife Rosenmeyer: You called this film The Sweet Lemon Ballad, though you are best known as a painter and the film is highly cinematic. How did you find the form in which to unite the genres of ballad, painting, animation and film? Indeed, what prompted you to make a film at all, especially such a labour-intensive one?

Klodin Erb: I see The Sweet Lemon Ballad as a moving image, a ‘tableau vivant’. The film offers itself as an interesting form in which to consider painting; it illustrates the search for the right subject. The ballad form portrays the artist’s thoughts turning in circles. As a painter, I’m familiar with the topic of self-portraiture, and the film gave me a new form to deal with it, one quite unlike paint on canvas.

I chose a labour-intensive analogue production method because I am convinced that, through the intensity of the method, hand-made products develop an energy of their own. This creates a counterpoint to the contemporary digital age, because we are magically drawn to tangible, child-like experiences and recognise ourselves in playful actions.

AR: If the film is a self-portrait, then there are a few moments where the subject or the perspective switches, when the observed lemon becomes an active agent. And then you appear too, as both artist and actor. Can you describe your thoughts on the artist-subject binary?

KE: As the artist, I observe how the image develops and I intervene at the right moment so that it goes in the direction I intend to follow. Through this reciprocity emerges between actor and object, between the artist and the work to be produced. It is like real life, where people continually reinvent themselves, striking out on new routes and remodelling themselves after particular experiences.

AR: The lemon undergoes an awakening, a loss of innocence, then the story rapidly becomes darker and moves into the realm of horror, re-emerging into a love scene and then, finally, a metropolis. Would you call it a Bildungsroman?

KE: The film certainly has the elements of a Bildungsroman. I made choices and drew the course and design of the film into a particular form on the basis of collective memories; this form is familiar to us thanks to our experiences with film and literature and communicates information that can be appreciated consciously or unconsciously. The film is constructed like a river, like life, while in the art context it reminds us of Fischli and Weiss’s The Way Things Go.

AR: You’ve told me before that you are influenced by the idea of Plato’s cave and questions of illusion or reality. Shadows are applied with care in the film, and since completing it your painting practice has also been particularly attentive to shadows. Have you tried to show reality or to manufacture a sophisticated artifice?

KE: I created an artificial world within the film which, generally speaking, functions as an image of life, taking as its subject my own search for meaning or a theme. You could call it a parallel world that reaches out into life, as art in general tries to. The shadow is a metaphor for unutterable or unrecognisable feelings or drives in our existence and thus also in the production and perception of art.

AR: Given current affairs, it’s hard not to feel impotent. As you maintain your belief in the ability of art to ‘reach out into life’, what do you want to accomplish?

KE: I think it is art’s job to touch viewers at their core, to open their hearts to spiritual and emotional experiences and to beauty, and in so doing to appeal to and promote what is good and innocent.

Credits

Courtesy the artist and Rotwand Gallery, Zürich

With the kind support of Kanton Zürich, Fachstelle Kultur; Volkart Stiftung; Ernst Göhner Stiftung

Lemon: Klodin Erb

Script: Klodin Erb

Direction: Klodin Erb

Camera: Thomas Isler, Klodin Erb

Music: Bernd Schurer

Production: Klodin Erb

Edit: Thomas Isler

Set Design/Animation: Klodin Erb

Costume Designer: Natalie Peclard

Title Designer: Norm

Color Grading: Fabian Kimoto