It was one of the hottest days of one of the hottest summers I can remember. The newly asphalted square outside the recently reopened MCBA in Lausanne — entirely without shade — seemed to radiate heat. Inside, in the air-conditioned museum, one work interested me more than all others: Paul Cézanne’s Nature morte aux sept pommes et tube de couleur (1878–79). The small-format oil painting, which shows exactly what its title describes, surprised me with its simplicity, but also with its sophistication; the painting reflects on the process of its own creation. A small tube of oil paint, barely visible at the edge of the image, reveals the artificiality of this otherwise simple still life. These seven apples were lying there because they were meant to be painted.
Visiting Marius Steiger’s exhibition “Monsieur Hulot” at Blue Velvet in Zurich, I found myself thinking of Cézanne’s apples again and again.
In his painterly practice, Steiger engages with an expanded concept of the still life. This time, his engagement took shape within an installation inspired by generic, slightly dusty office spaces. Aside from a newly laid wall-to-wall carpet in what I assume is a deliberately unflattering shade of blue, all elements of the exhibition are realized as shaped-canvas paintings that are placed next to, into, or even on top of each other. The centerpieces of the exhibition are a series of bookshelves (Case, 2025), to which, alongside books, Steiger added bottles of alcohol, busts of Marx and Engels, cigarettes, houseplants, bananas, and, of course, also his signature apples. While the shelves and books are rendered as monochrome abstractions, on which, depending on the light, one might at most detect individual brushstrokes, the remaining objects are painted in almost realistic detail.
This brings me back to Cézanne, who made the artificial nature of his still life visible by placing the paint tube at the edge of the pictorial space. In his works, Marius Steiger does not refer directly to real objects, but rather to self-made digital templates (renderings), which he transfers onto object-shaped canvases with a flat, precise painterly technique. The digital origin of these paintings’ motifs, which only becomes apparent at second glance, as well as the raw, unpainted sides of the canvases, mock a first impression of perfectly replicated “reality” upon closer inspection – just as Cézanne did with his paint tube.
Steiger already poses viewers these painting-specific questions of reality and its imitation before they’ve even entered Blue Velvet: the view through the gallery’s windows is blocked by the backs of numerous stretcher frames reaching from floor to ceiling. Seen from the inside, they present themselves as trompe-l’oeils of wooden beams (Wood, 2025) — recalling boarded-up windows, as we know them from apocalyptic movie scenes. The effect, achieved through precise studio work, has already been unmasked by the artist before we’ve even had the chance to be fooled.
The accompanying text discusses cinematic references to Jacques Tati, specifically his film Playtime (1967), a satire of modern life that inspired Steiger’s office interior at Blue Velvet. The movie’s main character, Monsieur Hulot, reappears in the exhibition’s title. However, this backstory doesn’t seem particularly important to understanding and appreciating the exhibition; Steiger’s engagement with the medium of painting is interesting enough without it. I also gladly turn a blind eye to the fact that the artist’s relationship to the generic aesthetics of capitalism and its associated consumerism remains ambivalent. When Steiger hangs two life-sized paintings of sports cars in the second exhibition room, it’s unclear to me as a viewer whether his fascination is an affirming one, or if the painterly replication of these objects is meant as a critique — and if so, what exactly is being criticized.
Cézanne once claimed he wanted to “astonish Paris with an apple.” In Steiger’s work, I see a similar ambition. The depictions of the quotidian subjects, which he has focused on since the early days of his practice, have become increasingly refined through a technically meticulous approach. Personally, I am pretty astonished by his apples.
