A Boy, a Castle,
and Three Mountains

The boy grew up just below the ruins of the castle at Leuk, overlooking the Rhône. And on the other side, staring back at him: those three mountains. They were, to him, so part of his childhood he treated them as another boy would treat his pets.

They were the end of his horizon, and the beginning of his fantasies. His burning question was always: what was beyond? So finally, when he was eight, he set out towards them, through the forest of Pfyn.. or Finges. Because it was here, where the valley widened suddenly and twisted, that Swiss German turned into French.

The boy crossed the forest and started up that gaping mouth of the gorge of Illgraben, stripped naked of soil and trees by floods: just loose boulders, no hiking paths and the ever-present threat of rockfalls. He was scared long before it got dark, and by then his mother had started to look for him. It was 2 or 3am when he got back, his questions unanswered. The next time he was in that blackness he would be running for his life.

/

I would meet Carlo almost six decades later, in that castle above his childhood home. He was dressed as he always is: all in black, in one of the three t-shirts he owns. Carlo has dealt with millions of Swiss francs over his lifetime, but money has never been an interest for himself. It has always been for art, and others.

We had never heard of each other till a phone call ago. A photographer I had met some days before had told me that Carlo was the man to help me with ideas for funding my art projects. I was new in the region and knew no one. I was desperate for help.

Carlo started talking in that shell of a castle, now renovated into an art space by the architect Mario Botta. He spoke to me for three hours. He talked to me of everything that goes on behind the art that you and I might see. The wires and pipes and plumbing. Institutions and funding and names and numbers. I should have been taking notes, but, instead, it was Carlo who was writing frantically as he spoke. At the end of those three hours, he handed me a handful of pages. That afternoon, he did more to help me than anyone had in the country in ten years.

/

He must have been eight years old when he was playing with his stamps on the stairs in his house. The doctor and his mother were behind the door, and they were talking in hushed tones about his father. As he strained to hear those words, his life fell apart, cracking all over those old floorboards. His father was dying. The doctor gave him five years. It was a secret kept from not only the children, but the father too.

Carlo had always worshipped his father. They worked on the vineyards together, and spent hours a day in the barn. They would often go up the mountain to their alp on Sundays, and give the sheep salt and bread.

His father worked all the time. First at the aluminium factory, then in the barn, and then in the vineyards. When he got back home at 11 at night, exhausted, he would collapse into a chair and ask Carlo to help him with his shoes. Carlo would untie those laces, separating them from the metal hooks, away from the too-thin leather. He would peel off his father’s socks, wet with sweat. Their patterns, knitted by his grandmother, would be imprinted into the pale white of his skin.. the flesh crinkled as if it had been underwater. Carlo still sees those patterns and white feet today.

When they were in the vineyards, his father would often reach across the row towards Carlo, to help the boy take out too strong a weed. But now, when that happened, Carlo saw worms eating at his father’s hand.

Meanwhile, his mother started another business from home, cutting hair. She would need as much money as she could earn, because the bank needed to be paid for the house. It had always been unaffordable to them, but had been offered at a discount by a friend. And if the bank found out of the father’s impending death, it would have forced them to sell the property.

That night, when he first heard the secret, Carlo escaped. He opened his bedroom window, grabbed onto the shutter, slid down the drainpipe, and set off into the night, in the only direction he had ever dreamed of: into that gorge of blackness that led to his mountains.

/

Carlo has been wandering ever since. He would go missing from school because he left, repeatedly. When he was 13, he went to Hamburg. He had seen on TV that there were a lot of Swedish prostitutes there, so he went to reason with them, to tell them they had other, better options. He said they’d made a mistake, and that he could tell them of another life. The women laughed, and he continued hitchhiking to Scandinavia, Belgium, France… with 30 francs in his pocket and no prostitutes converted. By the time he was 20, he must’ve visited 100 countries.

In Paris, he escaped a man following him as he looked for a place to sleep in a park. He worked on farms and in the forests in Canada, on fishing boats in Florida. He had to go into hiding from the police in the Bahamas, got abandoned by a mail boat and had to survive on an island till the next one appeared. He would party for months in Jamaica: there was so much to smoke and so many more things that he was late by the time he finally got to Venezuela.

And there, in Caracas, he called the Swiss Bank Corporation (which would later become UBS) and asked, in English, how much money they had of his. None, he was told. At that moment, in Venezuela, he forgot where he was, and swore in the unadulterated Swiss German dialect of his native village, half a world away. And, immediately, the voice on the other end responded, switching from perfect English to the same dialect of the alps. “Who the hell are you?!” The banker was Meyer, and he came from Turtmann, a handful of kilometers from Carlo’s Leuk. And Carlo had, they discovered, painted Meyer’s father’s house.

So Meyer invited Carlo to his house, and got his wife to pay for the taxi. But Carlo said there was a problem: “I have a few women with me…” Meyer was unfazed. “No problem, I have a huge house and there’s place for all of them.” So Carlo spent the rest of his time there in the penthouse, high above Caracas.

Through his new friend, he would meet farmers at parties. Men who had never been to school, but had become millionaires overnight, when oil was found on their property. One evening, one of them said he had three Ferraris. Hearing this, another swore to buy three too. And a third asked: “what the hell is a Ferrari?”

In time, Carlo would leave the penthouse, and head into the slums of Caracas, looking to help people. But it was too dangerous, and he would eventually leave.

And then Colombia, and a 25-hour bus journey. He knew he was a marked man, the only gringo in sight. And when his neighbor slashed his backpack he knew he had to befriend him to survive. So he slid up to him and offered him everything he had.. mostly fruit. The man offered Carlo some biscuits, two of which stuck out of the pack. Carlo knew they were probably poisoned, but he didn’t want to refuse. So he choose the biscuits at the back of the pack. But his neighbor was smarter, and had poisoned everything.

And so Carlo wandered on, far far away from those mountains of his childhood. Always searching for what lay ahead, always looking to help people. Was it naivety? Courage? Belief? Escape?

As he hid from the police in the slums of Nassau (“they’d never search for a gringo here”); as he pretended to be rich in the only white trousers he had; as he jumped into the ring of Mohammad Ali, pretending to be a broadcaster; as he stared, wild eyed, as they armed the children in that little village above Lima that looked like heaven; as they broke the teeth of the women with the butts of their rifles before they raped them; as the man on the bridge in Lima was shot for a handful of dollars for the photojournalist; as he floated on straw islands on Titicaca. As he struggled on the high pass between Bolivia and Peru; as he spent a week in jail in the Andes, but was thrown out because he was too poor. As he suddenly became a millionaire in La Paz, and then an enemy during the Guerra de las Malvinas; as he was forced at gunpoint to kneel in front of everyone, and lick an army boot. As he gave a thousand dollars to a woman on the street, making her a millionaire too.

As he stared at the world, and at all these worlds. This is how I see him forming. One can see all this in his art, and in himself. There is really no separating the two.

It is an art of the spaces between people, a collective. It can involve paint, or minerals secreted underwater, or anything at all. While others might obsess over materials and form, Carlo occupies himself with ideas.

People sense his humanity, immediately. Everyone comes to Carlo. He is at the centre of it all: between artists and institutions and curators and the government, money and the poor, paint and sculpture and earth, politicians and the homeless, the environment and industry.

/

Carlo stared at that pattern of the socks on his father’s legs every day of the work week, which included Saturdays. His father would, on Sundays (the one day when he could have slept late), start cooking breakfast for the family while they slept. He would make polenta and then fry that hard Walliser bread, the Roggenbrot, on the pan. And then he would cook lunch when the children were at mass. “He lived for others his whole life. He was an idol for me.”

And now, after 65 years, Carlo’s voice, echoing softly through this castle, talking to me, very softly. There under us is the house where he grew up. That vineyard, never enough, was where he helped his father. And always, staring back: those three mountains of his childhood.

/

If anyone else had told me such stories, I might not have believed them. But I have lived his crazy ideas, have sourced materials for him, grown in the sea off the Maldives.

This is a man who got scientists from eastern Europe to help him plant flowers here in the high Valais, plants that would suck metals out of the soil. And the man who then created art out of that metal after burning those plants in a furnace. More importantly, this is the man who could convince the government to fund an idea as crazy as this. An idea crazy if anyone else had dared speak it out aloud. But no one else did.

– Pinaki. April, 2023. Valais.

CV

Cultural engagements

Freelance artist since 1977

1981, 1989 Artistic work in America

Elaboration of morphological panels in Ireland, Iceland and Egypt

1990 Artistic work in the Soviet Union, GDR and China

1997 Action Art Bosnia-Herzegovina

Member of the artist group Acht-8, Cultural Commission of Leuk

Project team International Spycher Prize, Art Pro, Canton Valais

President, Art Commission, Foundation Art in Hospital

Artist Group 1½, Türmlihüs, Winterthur

Instructor, Cultural Property Protection Valais

Board member, Homeland Security

Board member, Culture Valais

Board member, Try Art

Board member, Visarte Valais

Purchasing commission, Canton Valais

Culture council, Canton Valais. 2010–2022

Responsible for Culture Foundation, Leuk Castle. 1999–2023

Institute for New Perception

Creative Alpin Atelier

Project manager, Foundation Chinderwält, Visperterminen, & Green Room, Agarn

Honorary member, Visarte Switzerland

Jury member, Art Valais

Lecturer, Art School Sierre, Valais

Cultural delegate, Leuk. 2012–2023

Exhibitions

Over 200 exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad since 1983

1991 Galerie Grahl, Berlin

1991 Nordkunst, Hamburg

1992 Zentrumsgalerie, Moscow

19993 Art 54 Gallery Soko, New York

1995–2001 Intern, Kunstmesse, Zürich

1996 Kulturausstausch CH-E-A

1996 Katharinensaal, St. Gallen

1996–2000 Art Frankfurt

1997 Galerie Station 3, Vienna

1997–1998 Art Multiple, Düsseldorf

1997, 2000, 2003 Galerie la Ferronnerie, Paris

1998 Kunsthaus Grenchen

1998, 1999, 2002, 2005 Galerie Hafner, St. Gallen

1998, 1999 Galerie Winter Berlin

1999, 2001 Art Forum Berlin

1999 Austrotel Contemporary Art Fair, Vienna

2000, 2001 FAC, Siders

2000 Leinwandhaus d. Stadt Frankfurt

2002 Galerie APC, Murten

2004 Use-go, Art Olten

2004 Merce, Barcelona

2006, 2008 Forum Valais

2008 Ferme d'asile

2008 Label Art Fully

2001, 2003, 2009 Galerie Ilka Klose, Würzburg

2011 Label art, Sierre

2013 Künstlerhaus Solothurn

2014, Maxxx Sierre

2014 Mon Tan Dun Sierre; Mon Tan Dun Klaipéda, Lithuania

2013, 2017 Forum Valais

2016 Galerie de la Treille, Sion

2016, 2017 Manoir Martinach

2016, Lefkada, Hall Theodoros Stamos, Greece

2016, Creative Villages, Leytron

2016 APCd Marly, mobility

2017 Vernissage, Zermatt

2017 Zone 30, Sierre

2017 Under construction, Triennale, Valais

2017 Brig and Croatia, Triennale

2017 En Marche, Valais Cantonal Museum, Sion

2017 Maxxx, Siders

2014–2020 Appetizer, Leuk

2018, Arthothèque, Sion

2018 Augmented Reality Expo, Leuk–Visp–Susten

2019 Jubilee Expo, 30 years, Galerie Brigitte Négrier, Paris

2019 Ferme d`Asile, Sion

2019 Nyffeler from today’s perspective, Brig

2019 Galerie Oblique, St. Maurice

2019 Atelier du Nord, Sion

2019 Aesthetic reflections, Leuk

2019 Galerie la Ferronnerie, Paris

2019 Galerie Grande Fontaine, Sion

2020 Werkhof, Brig

2020 Landscape Park Binn, Twingi exhibition, Binn

2020 Art Genève

2021 Visarte Art Festival, Brig

2021 C3 Arte, Mexico City

2021 Oberwalliser Kunstverein Matze

2021 Oberwalliser Kunstverein Regionale

2021 Espace Culture, Sion

2021 In Memoria, Sion

2021, 2022 Technopol Geneva

2022 Art and Nature, Guttet

2022 Tandem, Visarte Valais

2022 Complexity Science Center, Mexico City

2022 Art Procession, Wandfluh, Raron

2022 Lichtspiele, Olten

2022 Palacio Municipal Gallery, San Luis Potosi, Mexico

2022 Porto Veccio, Italy

2022 Künstlerhaus, Vienna

2023 Appetizer, Leuk Castle

2023 Wandfluh, Raron

2023 Galerie Manoir, Martigny

2023, Galerie la Ferronnerie, Paris

2023 Museum Fabrika, Moscow 23*

2023 Norilsk Museum, Siberia 23*

Prizes & Invitations

1987 Selected for Art in the Old Town, Winterthur

1997 Invited by the Art Association Obersee, Berlin

1991 Invited to The Soviet Designers, Moscow

1995 Art Zürich, with Schang Hutter, Pascal Seiler, Gottfried Honegger

1997 Art Symposium, Vilnius

1997 N'gor, Dakar

1998, 1999 Cultural Year in Beijing

2004 Artist scholarship, Barcelona

2002 Innovation prize, cultural projects

2004, Kunst am Bau, Varen

2005 Kunst am Bau, hospital, Brig

2005 Kunst am Bau, Raiffeisenbank, Stalden

2006 Innovation prize, Swiss mountain water award

2009 Generation integration prize

2008 Project Spilstrass, Visp

2010 Winner of Artist in Residence, PH Rorschach

2010 Research project, aesthetic education. ETH Zürich

2013, 2014 Festival for Ephemeral Art

2014, 2015 Art Pro

2014 Montandun, Lithuania

2015 Sternprojekt, Valais

2015 Cultural participation project

2015 Kunst am Bau, Dorfplatz, Saas Almagell

2017 Culture prize of the city of Leuk

2020 Invitation, Twingi

2020 Research project, Canton Valais

2020 Selected for the project When Instead of Glaciers, Alps Glow

2021 Laureate, project Phytomining

2021 Laureate, project Biomimikry

2022 Project Pop Up, Pro Helvetia

2021, 2022 First, Kunst am Bau, schoolhouse, Susten.

2022 Second, Kunst am Bau, Fovahm, Saxon

2022 Les jours des éphémères, Olten

2022, 2023 First, Kunst am Bau, Zollgebäude, Brig