Conversation with Daniel Ferstl
- 3 days ago
- 10 min read
Popopidou mélancokitsch
Born in Linz in 1982, Daniel Ferstl lives and works in Vienna, where he has spent fifteen years building a prolific, primarily textile-based body of work. Between melancholic cartoon, internet culture, and pop references, his work develops an immediately appealing, almost "cute" universe, behind which something more vulnerable nonetheless surfaces. Stylized dogs, anthropomorphic flowers, and soft, floppy figures populate compositions marked by a permanent tension between tenderness and unease.
Interview conducted in the context of Daniel Ferstl’s Cajoline exhibition at the Ateliers Vauban in Besançon.
---
>>> What does a work begin with: a drawing, a painting, a textile? And from that starting point, how does a direction take shape?
It always starts with a lot of time spent sitting or lying in bed, mulling over possible ideas. That process can take forever. I'm a very impatient person, and after a while it starts to feel really unproductive. Once an idea is finally good and interesting enough to pursue, I go shopping for textiles and other materials. I rarely sketch — everything gets worked out in my head.
>>> How do you recognize that an idea finally deserves to be made? Is there a precise moment when it stops being a mere possibility and becomes a necessity?
When self-doubt has disappeared and I feel confident enough.
>>> Your work blends painting, sewing, soft sculpture, and textile design with popular visual culture, but also references to modern painting as much as to domestic fabrics, streetwear, and cartoons. How do you build this vocabulary, and what pleasure do you find in putting such distant registers into dialogue?
I've always been interested in a lot of different mediums. It might seem unusual for an artist, but I don't appreciate what's considered "elitist" art as much as I probably should. I like creative, imperfect things, which often end up as a beautiful catastrophe. Things considered kitsch — "the tragically ridiculous, or the ridiculously tragic," as John Waters defines it. Smooth perfection or intellectualized boredom doesn't move me much. My inspiration comes from pop music; I love binging series of B-movies (Italian giallo, 80s American horror and action, old romantic comedies) and shonen anime. I love old sentimental, kitschy Austrian films with a regional grounding (full of popular songs from the 50s and 60s). There are also video games, meme culture, Twitch streaming. All of this is constantly digested and mixed into something that, sooner or later, can translate into artworks.
>>> You studied painting, animation, and tapestry at the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna, in Christian Ludwig Attersee's studio. How did this training, and tapestry in particular, shape your language — perhaps in a way that painting alone wouldn't have allowed?
I never actually did tapestry during my studies there — it was old-school rug weaving, with little room for experimentation. To be honest, we didn't learn much from our professor, apart from how to party and act like a genius, haha. Painting (painting alone, specifically) always felt very cramped to me. I made tons of unfired clay figurines, and also some pretty singular dance films with a friend, which mocked the annoying performance art that was everywhere at the time. It was an enormous relief when — years later — I found my current approach to art. Now I'm free to do whatever I want.
>>> Your work features many animal figures: dogs, anthropomorphic flowers, hybrid creatures. Why do these characters sometimes seem more human than humans themselves?
I've never felt very comfortable with human figures in my art. As a kid I always wanted to become an animator for Walt Disney Studios; I was in elementary school when the "Disney Renaissance" happened in the late 80s, and it left a real mark on me. It's somewhere between the Pathetic Fallacy and personification. Just as in animation, animals, flowers, and inanimate objects are perfect for telling deeply human stories, because I don't have to account for the human body, which is omnipresent in art today and which, in a way, bores me to death.
>>> Your works take a considerable amount of time to make. What happens during those long hours of sewing? Is it a time of concentration, meditation, boredom, or constant self-questioning?
I try to avoid self-questioning as much as possible. My therapist recently told me I suffer from a form of toxic management (toward myself). While I sew, I prefer to switch my brain off — most of the decisions are already made — so I put on Let's Play videos or a Twitch stream. A good old 80s–90s playlist helps too.
>>> The Wonnerth Dejaco gallery's text on your work describes characters who, once out of the frame, look "slumped, exhausted, hopeless." These are plush toys — a medium meant to reassure — described with a vocabulary of psychic exhaustion. Historically, the advertising mascot was never allowed to be fragile either. By granting it the right to weariness, are you quietly sabotaging the affective economy it's supposed to serve? And does the fact that your works invite touch, almost use, play into that sabotage?
I love that. It seems to trigger something hidden in most adults, something old. It lets me steer the viewer exactly where I want them, emotionally.
>>> That "something old" — is it more a personal childhood memory, or a more universal reflex toward the plush-toy object?
I don't know. Maybe it's a form of universal knowledge, but maybe it's nothing at all. Maybe I'm just fantasizing about the idea of accomplishing something while I'm still here.
>>> You talk about "industries of affection." But plush toys and mascots (meant to reassure us) are mass-produced, collected, resold, discarded: real scapegoats, in a way. How, in your view, does one get out of these industries of affection? And how does one stop believing in one's plush toy?
You shouldn't stop believing in it. That's the death of magic.
>>> But concretely, how does one keep believing in it as an adult, knowing the plush toy was mass-produced? Does that magic still seem possible to you as an adult, or is art precisely one of the last places where it can survive?
I'm not sure. Nothing is less magical than the art world, but you can still try to make magic with art.
>>> In Backseat Dreamer, a moth lands on the most precious fabrics. Is this a conscious nod to the vanitas tradition in painting, where the insect always signals the corruption of luxury?
Exactly. I also see them as a kind of omen. Of things that could happen, and that feeling of existential dread that catches up with me when I'm awake at night. I'm a man who believes in science, but I'm also quite superstitious. I just can't escape it. I want magic to be real, haha.
>>> Some pieces (Armageddon, Passive Progressive, Penanggalan) hide a small electric motor that introduces mechanical movement into an otherwise entirely manual medium. Is this artificial pulse a way of injecting anxiety, or a small surprise/discomfort, into your works?
What surprised me most was the cacophony of all those little electric motors running in the same room. It was pretty chilling. Those works were about escape, as an artist living in constant fear of selling out or going bankrupt. The noise really turned out to be an unexpected asset.
>>> There's a very strong tension between what your works depict and how they look: troubling subjects take shape in soft, thick, almost comforting materials. Why does this contradiction interest you so much?
Because even though people on social media try to convince us of the opposite, most things in our lives play out in gray areas. Nothing is 100% good or bad. No one is always moral, even if I wish that were the case.
>>> Is that precisely where, in that fragile balance, the interest of a work lies for you — something close to the uncanny as Mike Kelley staged it? What place does this artist hold among your references? And for you, does that strangeness arise more from the material itself — its texture, its domestic familiarity — or from what it represents?
Sometimes I wish I could be as naturally cool, as punk or subversive, and yet as wonderfully tender as Mike Kelley was. I can only be myself. Even before working with textiles — I was purely a painter during my studies — I was already trying to work with the uncanny, the unconscious, uncharted territory. Having suffered from anxiety and depression from early adulthood has also deeply influenced my work. You learn to deal with all that shit and it ends up becoming part of you, or maybe it always was. Working it into my art blunts the edge of it.
>>> Andrea Kopranovic connects your anthropomorphic floral forms to Volkskunst, folk art — a register historically looked down on by high art. Does your work seek to rehabilitate this decorative vocabulary, or rather to reveal its ambivalence?
It's just something I've always known. I grew up in a very loving working-class family. My grandmother did folk painting as a hobby; I still have some of her ornamental wooden plates at home.
>>> Those plates your grandmother painted — do you still look at them while you work?
No, but I have a few hanging in my kitchen.
>>> Kitsch and cool often seem opposed, yet in your work they go hand in hand. Where's the line between a naff object/symbol and a cool one, if such a line even exists? Does bad taste seem to you a more honest truth than certain forms of cultural sophistication?
I don't think my work is cool at all. I'm too emotional and melodramatic to be cool. But I do seem to always be chasing after cool. I'm very proud of knowing what's cool and what isn't. I guard it jealously. A bit like that little neighborhood bar across from my place, where only normal people go to drink. Then suddenly the art-world crowd shows up en masse and ruins it instantly. I hate when that happens. Leave alone the things that are sometimes poor, tasteless but honest, and if you can't help it, at least don't mock them. Everybody hates a tourist.
>>> You don't want to talk about irony or cynicism in your work. Yet irony is often contemporary art's defense reflex against kitsch, its way of covering itself. By refusing that safety net, you risk being taken literally: is that a deliberate gamble?
I'd rather be a fool, but an honest fool. I know some people find my work superficial, or don't want to look behind the facade. And I myself don't like much art. That's life.
>>> You say you don't know whether your work is cool; but is that even a question that's yours to answer? Isn't it precisely up to the public to decide, since "cool" always plays out in the eye of the beholder?
Well, if someone considers my work cool, I'll gladly accept it.
>>> The title Passive Progressive seems to condense your method: a critique that never raises its voice, that curls up inside the motif rather than denouncing it head-on. Treating "cool" as a distance that's never openly militant — is that, for you, a sufficient and legible critical strategy for our times?
I don't know. I'm quite politically engaged in real life. Art isn't real life for me. Would I get my message across more effectively if I slapped loud slogans on it? Maybe. But I steer away from that. Some people are very good at it. I'm afraid anything I'd add would just be cringe. And cringe political art never accomplishes anything (at least, that's what I think).
>>> Where does that engagement play out, and why does the line with art feel so clear-cut to you?
I've seen so many articles about art's ability to change the world, and I always find that a bit ridiculous. Few people outside the art-world bubble take art, and what it tries to present, seriously. Changes can and must be made to our very unjust world; I personally try to do my best.
>>> Let's stay on this concept a bit: what is "cool," to you? Are there figures who embody it more than others, and — coming back to what we said about your characters — why do so many contemporary "cool" figures seem tired, detached today, as if vulnerability itself had become an aesthetic?
How could one not be tired? These creatures are, to some extent, me. Which means they have to eat healthily, exercise, and be their own manager, therapist, and life coach. And they're chronically online. The internet was a huge mistake.
>>> You say: "These creatures, that's me." When you create a new creature, do you feel it expresses something you couldn't say any other way?
Not sure. I'm a very sensitive person, to my own detriment, and I tend to overshare. Maybe it's good to step back and let my creations play that role in my place.
>>> Your work contains references to the internet, brands, fandoms, gaming, memes. Do you feel our collective imagination today is largely produced by commercial and algorithmic forces?
I'm always online and I watch what goes viral and how that virality gets manufactured. Bot accounts, fake praise — it's pretty fascinating. My way of dealing with it is to consume as much old media (from the pre-digital era) as I can, so I don't get swept up by an algorithm.
>>> You co-founded MAUVE, an artist-run space in Vienna (2012–2016), outside institutional circuits — though not entirely giving that up, since you now exhibit in galleries. What does "building your own scene" mean? And are these independent, DIY spaces still capable of producing genuine counter-cultures, or are they too being absorbed or dissolved by the contemporary art economy?
Is there even such a thing as a real counter-culture in the art world? I'm not sure. I think artist-run spaces are necessary, but I wish they didn't have to be. The thing about Vienna is that there's no "art economy." It always makes me cringe when some detached journalist writes that Vienna is a cool art metropolis. There are very good artists, but almost no infrastructure (and no collectors). It's the self-organized spaces that carry the whole art scene on their backs. Maybe it's the same everywhere. I don't know.
>>> If you could invent the ideal conditions for working and showing your art today, what would they look like?
I have this very romantic idea of a space where I could live and work, and also host people and show their work. A garden to relax and party in. Being able to afford that would be a dream come true.
Interview conducted by Vincent-Michaël Vallet