A leading figure of photorealist painting, Franz Gertsch (born 1930, Switzerland) has created monumental portraits of charismatic youths and meditative depictions of nature in vivid and pains- taking detail for over fifty years. Polyfocal Allover surveys Gertsch's paintings from 1970 to 1982 and woodcut prints from 1979 to 2019, reflecting a vision in which all that lies within the frame is accorded equal value. The essays, interviews, and conversations in this publication bring further definition to the lives and landscapes Gertsch renders with such virtuosic, eerie precision.

Luigi Pericle (1916-2001) was a rare talent-a self-taught illustrator and painter, a man of letters, mystic, theosophist, and intellectual whose work and legacy eludes any categorization. Under his proper name Pericle Luigi Giovanetti he had great success as an illustrator and cartoonist in the 1950s. His cartoons were published worldwide in daily newspapers, such as the Washington Post or Herald Tribune, as well as in satirical magazines like Punch. His comic strip Max the Marmot, published in newspapers and books, was hugely popular across Europe, the United States, and Japan. In 1958, he turned to explore abstract expression through painting and ink drawing. He quickly gained international recognition as an artist and his paintings were exhibited in gallery and museum shows in Britain and Switzerland during the 1960s. Yet recognition was not what he was looking for, and he disappeared voluntarily from the art world to lead an increasingly secluded life dedicated entirely to his art and writing. His home Casa San Tomaso on the legendary Monte Verita in Ascona, in southern Switzerland, offered ideal surroundings for an artist so strongly drawn to spirituality. Luigi Pericle. Ad Astra, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the MASI Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, offers a fresh look at how the spiritual environment and tradition of Monte Verita influenced Pericle as an artist and how Asian calligraphy and Zen Buddhism were influential to his drawing practice. Moreover, the book investigates Pericle's understanding of abstraction in art and his own syncretism of modern mysticism. Text in English, German and Italian.

Die Studie beschreibt die Validierung der Rhetorik durch die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus am Beispiel dreier ihrer groessten Vertreter und foerdert drei deutlich unterschiedene Positionen zutage. Den Leitfaden der Untersuchung bilden die von Platon formulierten und von Kant, Fichte und Hegel jeweils unterschiedlich ausgedeuteten zentralen Gesichtspunkte philosophischer Rhetorikreflexion: die logisch-methodologische, die asthetische und die politisch-moralische Kritik sowie die Kritik des Rhetorischen als Korruption der Philosophie selbst.

It is unsurprising that French photographer Valerie Belin (born 1964) should so plainly declare: "I come from painting." Although she uses a photographer's equipment, her images are far removed from realism. Whether responding to a still life by Edouard Manet or exploring societal constructions of female beauty, Belin emphasizes textural artifice and molded color, even when working in black and white.

Mountains have been a central defining theme in Switzerland, as they have elsewhere in the world. This has fascinated artists and, since the earliest invention of the medium, photographers. Today mountain chains are seen differently than they once were, recognized as having an unsettling fragility in the face of their occupation by humans. What remains of the myths linked to mountains? Are mountains still a source of inspiration for today's artists? How do perceptions of them shift as their populations disappear, and cultural references are increasingly centred on an urban existence? High Altitude provides some of the answers to these questions. This book is a companion to the Swiss photography festival, Alt. +1000, held in Rossiniere in the foothills of the Alps. "High Altitude" features works by contemporary photographers who record mountains in their various and multiple states: spectacular, sublime, domesticated, constructed (even artificial!) and frightening. Artists from around the world, many of whom live far from a mountainous environment, celebrate and challenge deeply rooted myths, and individually interpret this elusive landscape. In addition, well-known photographer Olaf Otto Becker, renowned for his views of Greenland, created a portrait of a natural park close to Rossiniere. Becker's work is breathtakingly beautiful, but its beauty nonetheless reminds us that nature is being radically modified by climate change.