About

Roger Weiss is a Swiss visual artist whose research explores the fragmentary construction of human identity in contemporary society through photography and video.

Graduated with honors from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, he investigates the human being as a threshold between presence and abstraction, memory and fiction.

His practice is guided by a constant tension toward the archetype: an inquiry into the body as a primordial figure that precedes roles, time, and narration.

He has exhibited in galleries and art fairs across Europe and the United States, including Ohsh Projects (London, UK), Gallery Sébastien Lepeuve (Clichy, FR), Snap! Orlando Gallery (Orlando, USA), Limonaia di Villa Strozzi (Florence, IT), Museo del Barocco (Noto, IT), Gervasuti Foundation (Venice, IT), StadtGalerie Brixen (Bressanone, IT), Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut (Heidelberg, DE), and Kulturzentrum Alte Kaserne (Winterthur, CH).

His works have been published in international art and photography books, including The Opéra (Kerber, DE), The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s (Josef Weiss Private Press, CH), and Doppelgänger – Images of the Human Being (Gestalten, DE), as well as in media outlets such as Schön! (UK), Interview Magazine (DE), Stern (DE), Carnale (IT), Digit! (DE), and Blink (KR). He has also been interviewed by Dazed (UK), i-D (UK), Exibart (IT), ArtsLife (IT), RSI (CH), Vogue Italia (IT), and NY Arts (USA).

In parallel, he has collaborated with international brands such as Apple, Enterprise Japan, Amina Muaddi, and Wolford, developing projects that placed his artistic research in dialogue with fields of visual and cultural innovation.

From 2017 to 2020, he directed the artistic vision of Collectible DRY, an international English-language magazine distributed worldwide, contributing to the definition of its conceptual and editorial identity.

Portrait

Selected Exhibitions

Two-Person Exhibition: StadtGalerie Brixen
Tutti i presenti che non sono mai esistiti
Brixen, IT
curated by Marco Pietracupa

Group Exhibition: Spazio Crea
Corpo d’acqua – Liquidità ed elemento antropico
Venezia, IT
Curated by Izabela Anna Moren (Fondazione Studio Rizoma) and Pier Paolo Scelsi

Group Exhibition: Quattrocantesimo
I PALAZZI STORICI AI QUATTRO CANTI RIVIVONO ATTRAVERSO L'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Palermo, IT
Curated by Roberto Bilotti Ruggi d'Aragona

Group Exhibition: Ohsh Projects
Liquify
London, UK
co-curated by Jon Baker and OHSH Projects

Art Fair: MIA Milan Image Art Fair
LOOKING AT HER
Paola sosio contemporary art milan, IT
Curated by DOMENICO DE CHIRICO

Group Exhibition: FUMES AND PERFUMES
FUMES AND PERFUMES 9.0
Stuttgart, DE (Catalogue)
Curated by Frank Bayh & Steff Ochs

Group Exhibition: SÈBASTIEN LEPEUVE Gallery
21
Clichy, FR
Curated by SÈBASTIEN LEPEUVE

Group Exhibition: Snap! Orlando Gallery
Le Salon 2017
Orlando, USA
Curated by Patrick Kahn

roup Exhibition: Snap! Orlando Gallery
Corpus
Orlando, USA
Curated by Patrick Kahn

Group Exhibition: Museo Regionale della Bonifica
L’energia della creatività
Rovigo, IT
Curated byi Melania Ruggini

Group Exhibition: Limonaia di Villa Strozzi
Diari Urbani
Florence, IT
curated by Chiara Massini

Group Exhibiiton: Museo del Barocco
LA BELLEZZA SOSPESA TRA VISIONE E REALTà
Noto, IT (catalogue)
curated by Chiara Massini

Art Fair: Photissima Art Fair
Welcome to the jungle!
Turin, IT
Curated by Famiglia Margini gallery Milan, IT

Solo Exhibition: PArCo | Padiglione Arte Contemporanea
Cyclical Time
Casier, IT
Curated by Chiara Massini

Group Exhibition: Gervasuti Foundation
SCREAMING SCREEN
Venice, IT

Solo Exhibition: Association Oltre la Moda, Spazio Luigi Salvioli artist representatives s.r.l. LULÙ
Milan, IT
Curated by Luigi Salvioli

Solo Exhibition: Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut
Sospension
Heidelberg, DE
Curated by Jakob J. Köllhofer

Group Exhibition: Kulturzentrum Alte Kaserne
Start 2
Winterthur, CH
Curated by Iren Tanner

Selected Artwork

Domestic Chronotopes
Traces
Hysteria
Human Dilatations
Flat Humans
Genealogy of a Body
Survey of Human Map
Intimate Archive
Cyclical Time
Be Two
I am Flesh

Selected Interviews

Art Platform: Artfield.APP
ROGER WEISS
14 July 2025, TR
Text by Tara Karaçizmeli

Magazine: Collater.al
LE HUMAN DILATATIONS DI ROGER WEISS
7 July 2023, IT
Text by Giorgia Massari

Blog: Exibart
OTHER IDENTITY #49. ALTRE FORME DI IDENTITÀ CULTURALI E PUBBLICHE: ROGER WEISS
Issue 49, 17 feb. 2023, IT
Interviewer: Francesco Arena

Newspaper: ArtsLife
ROGER WEISS: RIELABORARE IL CORPO ALLA RICERCA DEL SUO ARCHETIPO
the cultural revolution online, 19 Jan. 2023, IT
Interviewer: Rebecca Delmenico

Magazine: Carnale Magazine
HUMAN DILATATIONS
Issue 3, 10 pages + a limited edition poster of 100,
size 203x140cm. Sept. 2022, IT
Interview by Lorenzo Ottone

Magazine: SFG Magazine
THERE ARE NO IDEAS THAT ARE NOT CON- NECTED WITH PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, DESIRES AND FEARS
12 Feb. 2022, UA
Interviewer: Sergey Gutakovsky
Translation: Angelina Petrova
Editor: Sergey Fomkin

Magazine: Swarm Magazine
HUMAN DILATATIONS
02 Sept. 2021, Prague, Czechia
Interview by Markéta Kosinová

Podcast: SPREAKER Podcast
ROGER WEISS E L’ARTE DEL KINTSUGI
00:12:34, 02 July 2021, IT
by Alessio Bottiroli
On The Nature Of Light
Un podcast di e sulla fotografia

Magazine: I-D
I CORPI DISTORTI ED EMANCIPATI NEGLI SCATTI DI ROGER WEISS PER LA COLLEZI- ONE AMINA MUADDI X WOLFORD
29 July 2021, IT
TEXT by Carolina Davalli

Blog: The Dummy’s Tales
ROGER WEISS, IL CORPO ANARCHICO
08 Feb. 2021, IT
TEXT by Francesca Interlenghi

Magazine: Art Super Magazine
ROGER WEISS: EATING, THE ACT OF CONFIDENCE
Jan. 2018, IT
Interview by Annalisa Scandroglio

Magazine: D’Scene Magazine
THE PERSPECTIVE OF ROGER WEISS
4 pages, Dec, 2017, UK
Interview by Sav Liotta

Magazine: Digit! Magazine
AUSWEITUNG DER KOMFORTZONE
8 pages, Oct/Nov 2016, DE
Interview by Von Peter Schuffelen

Magazine: Hestetika Magazine
HUMAN DILATATIONS
8 pages, Oct. 2016, IT
Interview by Valentina De’ Mathà

Magazine: Dazed
THESE PHOTOGRAPHS EXPLORE NEW PER- SPECTIVES OF FEMALE BEAUTY
26 June 2016, UK
Interview by Ione Gamble

Blog: FotoRoom
HUMAN DILATATIONS: Roger Weiss Creates Mind-Blowing Portraits of Dilated Female Bodies
02 May 2016, IT

Rubrique: Les Blogs DE l’ART HELVÈTIQUE CONTEMPORAIN
UN HOMME EN MOUVEMENT: PORTRAIT DE L’ARTISTE DE THURGOVIE ROGER WEISS
23 July 2015, CH
Interview byJ-Paul Gavard-Perret
Rubrique des arts plastiques et de la littérature en Suisse

Magazine: Vogue Italia
ROGER WEISS
05 April 15, IT
Interview by Alessia Glaviano

TV: RSI, Cult Tv
ROGER WEISS
03 March 2014, CH

Magazine: Ticino Welcome Magazine
VOGLIO SCOPRIRE NUOVI TERRITORI DA ESPLORARE E RACCONTARE
6 pages, Sept/Nov, 2013, CH

Magazine: Blink Magazine
ROGER WEISS
14 pages + Cover, 2012, Korea

Magazine: NY Arts magazine
I AM FLESH
1 page, Summer 2011, NY

Magazine: Twill magazine
35 AN ETHMOGRAPHIC PROJECT
10 pages, June 2010, FR
TEXT by Adriano Zamperini

Magazine: Fotocomputer Magazine
ROGER WEISS
Issue 67, 6 pages, April 2005, IT

Special Projects

Enterprise Japan
Carnale Magazine
Learnn
Apple
Collectible DRY
Cosha
Wolford｜Amina Muaddi
Camilla Sparksss
Schön! Magazine

Selected Publications

CATALOG: AZEROSTUDIO EDITIONS
TUTTI I PRESENTI CHE NON SONO MAI ESISTITI
56 pages, OCT. 2025, CH

BOOK: Seltmann Publisher
FUMES AND PERFUMES
10 pages, 18 Jan. 2024, DE
Herausgeber / Editors: Frank Bayh & Steff Rosenberger-Ochs, Peter Franck, Bernd Kammerer, Monica Menez und Yves Noir

MAGAZINE: WeAr Magazine
We Are One
Issue 75, 1 page, March 2023. IT
Enterprise Japan FW23 Campaign

BOOK: Dumont Publisher
I SEE VULVAS EVERYWHERE
1 page, 18 July. 2023, DE
By Lisa Frischemeier

Book: Kerber Publisher
THE OPÉRA
10 pages, 14 Nov. 2022, DE
Edited by Matthias Straub Designed by Steffen Knöll Designed by Sven Tillack
Limited anniversary issue of The Opéra – Magazine for Contemporary Nude Photography – including its most famous positions of the past as well as new views on the human body

Magazine: Carnale Magazine
HUMAN DILATATIONS
Issue 3, 10 pages + a limited edition poster of 100,
size 203x140cm. Sept, 2022, IT

MAGAZINE: The Opéra Magazine
THE HUG
Volume X, 10 pages, 12 July 2021, DE

Magazine: D’Scene Magazine
THE PERSPECTIVE OF ROGER WEISS
4 pages, Dec, 2017, UK

MAGAZINE: The Opéra Magazine
HUMAN DILATATIONS
Volume VI, 8 pages, Oct. 2017, DE

MAGAZINE: Schön Magazine
HUMAN DILATATIONS
Issue 33, 10 pages, Oct. 2017, UK

BOOK: Josef Weiss Private Press
THE SONG OF SONGS, WHICH IS SOLOMON’S, 2016, CH

Magazine: Digit! Magazine
AUSWEITUNG DER KOMFORTZONE
8 pages, Oct/Nov 2016, DE

Magazine: Hestetika Magazine
HUMAN DILATATIONS
8 pages, Oct. 2016, IT

Magazine: Ticino Welcome Magazine
VOGLIO SCOPRIRE NUOVI TERRITORI DA ESPLORARE E RACCONTARE
6 pages, Sept/Nov, 2013, CH

Magazine: Blink Magazine
ROGER WEISS
Cover + 14 pages, 2012, Korea

BOOK: Gestalten Publishers
DOPPELGÄNGER, IMAGE OF THE HUMAN BEING
2 pages, Jan. 31, 2011, DE

Magazine: NY Arts magazine
I AM FLESH
1 page, Summer 2011, NY

Magazine: Twill magazine
35 AN ETHMOGRAPHIC PROJECT
10 pages, June 2010, FR
TEXT by Adriano Zamperini

Magazine: Fotocomputer Magazine
ROGER WEISS
Issue 67, 6 pages, April 2005, IT

2025｜Azerostudio Editions

Tutti i presenti che
non sono mai esistiti

Catalog: Azerostudio Editions
Tutti i presenti che non sono mai estiti
56 pages, October 2025, CH

This catalog was published on the occasion of the two-person exhibition by Valentina De’Mathà and Roger Weiss, Tutti i presenti che non sono mai esistiti (All Those Present Who Never Existed), a project curated by Marco Pietracupa and hosted at StadtGalerie Brixen (Italy) | 21 February – 27 March 2025 | Critical essay by Gianluca Marziani | Graphic design and art direction by Roger Weiss | Photographs by Valentina De’Mathà and Roger Weiss | English translation by Nina Zanetti-Martin | © 2025 Azerostudio Edizioni (an imprint of Azerostudio V. D. of Roger Weiss) | Via Ligornetto 1, 6855 Stabio (Switzerland) | ISBN 979-12-243- 0445-6 | Printed in October 2025 | Edition of 500 copies.

THE COLLECTIVE I
THE SINGULAR WE

Guianluca Marziani

Centuries of artistic creation have affirmed the primacy of the so-called individual act: a spontaneous methodology that emerged from an evolutionary leap of humankind, traceable to the epoch in which writing first appeared, around 3200 BC among the Sumerians of Mesopotamia. Before this psycho-emotional revolution, there were the first drawings of the Palaeolithic: those cave paintings that reinforced the collective masculine order within caverns from which women were often excluded. Thus, the shift from an oral world to the first written model coincided with a configuration of the human brain hitherto unrecognised: the capacity to calibrate imagination and dreams through the intimate codes ¨of drawing. No longer the exclusive preserve of the male circle, this became the prologue to a universal creative I - connected to mythological and magical otherworlds, attuned to a private instinct resonant with questions for which no causal answers were found.

In the centuries that followed, visual art began its own Odyssey, stitching together each epochal téchne, every cathartic leap of language, every avant-garde inscribed into history. If we give it proper thought, only painting holds its generative roots within the very instant of its making: as though thousands of years condensed each time into pigment on jute or wood, the entire evolutionary cycle entrusted itself to the iconographic mantra of Drawing Worlds, inscribing memories that clothe the author’s self-defining gaze with poetry and vision. Thus, if we wish to follow the trajectory of the creative act from caves to software, we must imagine an electric line of connection between the eyes and the worlds to which they belong: a simultaneous bridge that seeks the monumental within document, greatness within the fleeting moment, an empathic exchange within the resonance of drawing. This electric bridge is still the same as it was at the very origins of thought—swift and succinct, regardless of the complexity of each and every habitat, regardless of the instrumental facts that generate systems of interest beyond the intimate circumference of the work.

A leap of millennia thus brings us to the human profile of two artists who, out of the bond of identity, shape a meaningful and unconventional narrative - rich in elements that point towards the integration of two I’s that forge a momentary SINGULAR WE. Their names are Valentina De’Mathà and Roger Weiss - she Italo-Swiss, he Swiss - married and living in Ticino, Switzerland, in a place that has become the fitting habitat for nurturing the gestation of methodologies and creative processes.

This catalogue documents the installation as a whole before moving into close-ups of the individual works: an environmental methodology that serves as the philosophical framework for the processes surrounding the pieces, an ultraphysical vessel that transforms into inhabitable content—namely, the ensemble of motives and results of an SINGULAR I that, for that sustained moment, becomes a COLLECTIVE I.

Intimacy is the first conceptual hinge through which to reveal the project’s inner script. The installation itself has ‘terraformed’ two interconnected environments, creating a dialectic that resolves in two possible points of entry - and thus two distinct experiences - of the shared exhibition journey.

Anthracite Zone: RW

Roger Weiss presents three video installations from the series Domestic Chronotopes: Archaeology of the Everyday: to explore the threshold where the ordinary transcends its apparent banality, creating precisely the CHRONOTOPE, a Platonic space where time and place intersect in revelatory ways.

From the wall text: The installation functions as a living archive of the everyday.

At the intersection between time and space, memory and presence, an artiﬁcial intelligence speciﬁcally developed for this series by Brandcraft intervenes on two levels: on one hand, it alters the temporal linearity of the videos in response to external elements acting as causal conditions, on the other, in a selection of works, it also manipulates the documented daily actions by selectively removing the mediating objects of the action—for example, a person cleaning a carpet without a vacuum cleaner or a couple eating without using cutlery.

The subtraction of mediating objects brings us back to the baptismal value of an anthropological collective memory, to the ultimate meaning of instrumental actions that contain the revelation of every gesture ever shared, rewinding the iconographic moment back to the carvings on cave walls, back to the hands that chiselled or moulded idols into primordial sculptural forms.

Weiss’s subtraction, by emphasising automatic rituals and obsessive cycles, cleanses deep identity of multiple artificial residues, of ergonomic remnants in the form of egregores; in doing so, it leads the action towards the nirvanic dryness of the body, to demystify passive automatisms and lay bare the intimate function of the essential. The dissolved prostheses are cultural objects, physical productions that have accompanied the functional cycle of domestic habits; here we perceive them in their estrangement from Nature’s biological cycle, like spasmodic monads that cloud the division between the necessary and the superfluous, between what sustains and what oppresses. It is as if Weiss were stripping the human body of its performative skins, almost exchanging formulas with the asanas of yogic disciplines, with an ergonomic canon that strips function of its material consequences, grasping a new metaphysics of anatomy infused with social content.

Anthracite Zone: VDM

Valentina De’Mathà presents here six works, created with RA-4 and engravings on transparent, emulsion-coated polyesters, from the series If You Can Look Outside, Others Can Look Inside.

From the wall text: These works analyse the fragmentation and decomposition of the perception we have of ourselves, and that others have of us. A body of work rooted in psychological and philosophical questions, they appear like shattered mirrors fracturing our image/identity, which mutates continuously under the gaze of the Other. Everywhere there are eyes upon us, each one seeing something different: facets and tesserae of our personality. Yet the works also allude to the luminous screens of smartphones, the devices through which we are accustomed to communicating in contemporary society.

Fragmentation is the key word here - an idea and an action that dissolve the Veil of Maya in order to reconstruct vestiges of universal collective memory, reaching into the deep strata of a relentless anthropological cluster. The twentieth century itself, an age of disintegrations of harmonious form, reaffirmed construction after fragmentation, recreating that semantic multiplicity typical of progress, when the recombination of the same elements gave rise to different forms of a single moral vision. De’Mathà speculates on the optical effects of light as it suffuses the tesserae of her iconographic systems, sustaining the impermanence of the solar and lunar cycles, and using wall-grey as a reconciled contrast between light and dark, surface and depth. The paintings fluctuate between unveiling and revelation, akin to cyclical yet irregular waves - kaleidoscopic geographies that establish alchemical bridges between eyes and world. Each viewer reclaims their Singular I while nourishing the retinal continuity of the Collective I, poised between archetypal experience and the coalescence of a cosmogonic humus: our moment in the aquatic reflection shapes chimeras of ourselves, mirrored mythographies where we lose our contours to gain endoscopic luminosity—towards virtuous memories that surface, towards new intimacies that disclose primordial and resurgent angles.

White Zone: RW

Weiss has created a metaphorical video-garden entitled Cyclical Time, where, upon the floor, we see a man and a woman crossing a pool that reflects a border forest between nations.

From the wall text:The concentric ripples generated by their movement continuously fragment and recompose the image, evoking the cyclical nature of time and relationships. The installation is surrounded by a grassy lawn, requiring direct physical engagement from the viewer to approach the work.

The materials on display evoke that sense of cathartic intimacy which forms the true lymphatic system of the project. The lawn yields a softness one can inhabit; the circles of water unfold into the aforementioned endoscopic luminosities; the pool orchestrates melodies around the most accomplished aquatic architecture ever devised by humankind. Three elements that evoke the planetary cyclical time, reaffirming the abstract value of technology in the service of archetypes, annulling every superfluous mannerism, favouring the grammatical and syntactic mineralisation of the work.

White Zone: VDM

On the white walls surrounding Weiss’s video work, De’Mathà presents five paintings from the series Four Seasons, also created in the darkroom through experimental processes on emulsion-coated paper.

From the wall text: This selection of works also speaks of the fluidity that flows between one passage and another, in the blurred and overlapping margins between what ends and what emerges from it in the cyclicality of events. Humanity, through its being-in-the-world and its belonging to it, constantly relativises and transforms it. The sheen of the papers allows the viewer to merge with the work, which reflects the surrounding environment, just as they merge with the world itself—creating ever new possibilities: dynamic, unpredictable realities that vary in their repetition.

Small Room: RW + VDM

The Small Room represents the most intimate zone of the house and hosts four projections by Roger Weiss from the series Domestic Chronotopes. Here the gaze enters the bathroom—the private space of the liquid ritual, the energetic hideaway of elemental functions, the most homogeneous environment across multiple family cultures. Valentina De’Mathà, meanwhile, presents a triptych on emulsion-coated polyester: a simulation of a landscape beyond the window, an electric bridge between the Self (Selbst) and the Other, a two-dimensional synthesis of an unceasing battle between reality and perception, causes and effects, the visible and the invisible. Here too the two artists merge the ordinary and the extraordinary, using the private form of the gaze to bring into resonance the metaphysical form of the Universal I. One senses the contextual harmony, the cultural frequencies of their dialogue, the soft waves of a flight within the same atmosphere. The artist embodies energy, the work embodies mass, while walls and floor embody the speed of light in their successful installation equation. Everything remains unstable and dynamic, and yet—for that brief revelatory interval—their autonomous worlds become UNIVERSE.

Their works draw you in from the right distance, like cosmic magnets towards which you drift without choosing, in the direction of the zenithal light of every form and matter.

Once the connective bridge is established, the sinusoid of individual gazes begins: each viewer sees their own ideal sequence, eliciting reactions never predetermined, slipping into the cyclical time of unrepeatable repetition. Theirs is a stratified cyclical time, an emotional and sensorial cluster that has transformed technology itself into a kind of sculptural ether of infinite extension. Projection, action and painting together compose the temporary resolution of a SINGULAR WE, a fleeting flash beyond Western rationality—infused with philosophical and scientific factors yet condensed into semantic events that envelop us with love.

Installation Views

About

Selected Exhibitions