—  About

Patrick Chernus is an adman; he has worked in the field of marketing & advertising since he completed studies in Architecture at the ETH in Zurich.

He knows how to present and sell products. Nevertheless he became frustrated with today’s consumerism and how advertising was omnipresent in the public space: on buses and trams on city streets and in transit. It created a barrier between him and his environment. 

Then, gradually, he discovered that a picture taken through the perforated films transformed the scene beyond it. The same way the perception of our reality is influenced and distorted by advertising. He has been gathering these images over several years showing our cities in an entirely new light. 

From the outside of vehicles, advertising is multi-coloured. Sometimes it works, engaging and entertaining passers-by, sometimes it’s crude and unsophisticated. From within and close-up it is a mesh with circular holes that make scenes abstract; the mesh is sharp and textured, while the scene beyond becomes unclear, impressionistic. Light rays are crystallised, the greys and browns of the city merge, interrupted by the fluorescent green-yellow of emergency vehicles.  

Chernus does not call himself a photographer, but he is an insider who has found a new viewpoint. His work has been compared with that of the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, as it echoes Lichtenstein’s dotted graphic style, which in turn referred to the Ben-Day dots printing process, an inexpensive method used in pulp fiction in the 1950s and 60s. In truth, Chernus is turning Lichtenstein’s found technique on its head; not referring to the application of print, but to its absence. But he too is working with found objects, exploiting contingent circumstances. 

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