While it might seem foreign or unfamiliar, underwater life, bourgeois domesticity, or the world of Peter Wächtler’s animated cartoons are simply habitats, each one coming with a set of behaviors, life-forms, movements, objects, images, and relationships. What is a disaster in one is a miracle in another and nothing more than routine in another. Dislocating them or mixing them together short-circuits their logic. To a butler—like the character that so frequently appears in Wächtler’s work—acts of intimacy, hospitality, corruption, lust, kindness, desperation, generosity, jealousy, hypocrisy, or delinquency are all the same in the end—it’s all just administration. Or, in an animated cartoon, deadpan humor can be laced with depression and pathos, and used to tell stories of heart-broken rats or hobos.

Peter Wächtler’s recent solo exhibitions include dépendance, Brussels, Kunstverein Hildesheim, Ludlow 38, New York, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin, Etablissement d’en Face, Brussels. His work has been included in group exhibitions atLyon Biennale, Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels, Witte de With, and Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. 

Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial