Artist: Valentin Rilliet

Galerie Peter Kilchmann presents the third solo exhibition of the Swiss artist Valentin Rilliet (*1996, Geneva; lives and works in Zurich). In his new body of work, the artist engages with themes of life and death, transcendence, and spirituality. Liminal beings, such as ghosts or phantoms, as well as dolls that perhaps come to life at night or are assembled from individual parts, populate his works. The exhibition features small-, medium-, and large-scale paintings, together with a selection of works on paper.

With his previous solo exhibition at the gallery, Valentin Rilliet: The Dream Synopsys, (2025) the artist moved away from the often site- and source-specific themes that had characterized his earlier works. Instead, he expanded the narrative scope of his artistic practice and playfully developed his own mythology, through which he has continuously refined his visual language. He continues to pursue this approach in his latest oeuvre, while turning towards magical realism and allowing the everyday world to merge with the supernatural. His new works enter into dialogue with images encountered across different historical periods and at different moments in his own experience—as a viewer, a painter and an attentive observer of the world. At times clearly perceptible, these resonances extend from Ferdinand Hodler to the theatrical vocabulary of the Commedia dell’arte, opening onto a broader visual inheritance through which motifs, figures and landscapes are transmitted, transformed and reimagined across generations. Valentin Rilliet continues to work with omission and discontinuity in his paintings. Faces or masks, for example, are deliberately obscured by hands or hair, while scenes repeatedly leave gaps that invite viewers to speculate. Indeed, many of his paintings suggest a face veiled by a mask, introducing a further motif of concealment and speculation. In this way, the works become imbued with a sense of the magical that extends beyond their subject matter. Movement, both pictorial and narrative, remains another defining characteristic of the artist's new works: rather than presenting self-contained stories, the paintings unfold across multiple narrative strands and layers of action.