During the Renaissance, a debate known as the paragone delle arti became one of the most heated artistic disputes between painters and sculptors, shaping artistic discourse for centuries to come. The dispute concerned, among other things, the respective capacities of painting and sculpture: Which medium could imitate nature more convincingly? Which demanded greater intellectual ability? Which offered a more complete experience of the world?

Painting was often defended for its intellectual and imaginative qualities, while sculpture could be dismissed as an art of physical labor, requiring the artist to work directly with resistant materials. Yet the paragone was never simply a question of which medium was superior. It was also a way of asking what constitutes an image, how we perceive it, and where the work of art actually takes place. Is it in the object, in the artist’s imagination, or in the mind of the beholder?

It is precisely these questions that come to mind when looking at the sculptures by Christian Andersson currently on view at von Bartha in Basel. Andersson’s practice often begins with seemingly familiar objects, images, and cultural references, subjecting them to conceptual displacement. Here, sculpture is not presented as something entirely resolved by its material form. Instead, his works depend on something beyond themselves. Their physical presence is only the beginning of what the viewer is invited to complete.

At first glance, Polaroid appears almost like an archaeological fragment of an image or a three-dimensional computer-generated image that has not yet been fully rendered. Thousands of nails, arranged in a grid of 210 × 210 to create a total of 44,100 points, form a relief resembling a Polaroid photograph lying on a cobblestone surface. What we are given, however, is only the suggestion of a photograph, the rough outline of a story with gaps that invite us to fill them.

This gap is where the work unfolds. The object immediately triggers familiar visual and cultural associations. A Polaroid evokes a particular idea of photography: the instant, the snapshot, the private moment, or the physical trace of something that has happened. Andersson, however, does not provide the captured moment itself. Instead, we begin to imagine: What does it show? Who has taken it, and why was it dropped? What happened immediately before and after the depicted moment? The sculpture becomes strangely temporal. What initially appears to be a static object generates an entire situation. We construct a past and a future around an image that doesn’t even exist.

Here, the concept of nostalgia becomes particularly interesting. Nostalgia is not simply a quality contained within an old photograph or object. It emerges through the encounter between the object and our own memories. We project our experiences onto things and, in doing so, give them an emotional history that they don’t possess in themselves. I am reminded of my own childhood fascination with Polaroid cameras, how amazed I was by the possibility of printing a photo in an instant, and how I asked my parents how an entire printer could fit inside such a tiny machine. Even when an object itself reveals very little, it can open up a whole world of associations. In this sense, Polaroid turns sculpture into an act of projection. The physical work may be finished, but the image remains radically unfinished, completed only through our own imagination.

A similar but more dramatic displacement takes place in Mother Tongue, which takes Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture The Kiss as its point of departure.

Rodin’s The Kiss originated as a representation of Paolo and Francesca, the adulterous lovers from Dante’s Inferno. In Dante’s story, the two are discovered by Francesca’s husband while kissing and are subsequently killed, condemned to wander through Hell as punishment for their forbidden love. Detached from the specific narrative that originally identified the lovers, the work became known simply as The Kiss and gradually acquired the status of a universal image of desire.

Andersson takes this already familiar image and performs a decisive conceptual operation. He interrupts the kiss. Where Rodin gives us the completed encounter, the moment in which two bodies come together, Andersson separates the two heads. A bolt holds them apart on a metal incline, preventing them from colliding. We are left suspended between possibilities. Perhaps the kiss has already happened, and the lovers have separated. Perhaps it is about to happen for the first time. Perhaps it will never happen at all. The sculpture refuses to tell us.

This uncertainty is crucial. In Rodin’s sculpture, the viewer sees the kiss. In Andersson’s work, the viewer imagines it. The bolt that prevents the two heads from meeting introduces further tension. It does not merely hold the figures apart but also withholds the event that would bring them together. If the bolt were removed, the heads would collide, setting in motion an outcome that remains uncertain. The physical collision might suggest the destructive consequences of the encounter, echoing the fate of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s Inferno. Yet Andersson leaves this possibility unresolved. The kiss that, in Dante’s story, becomes the beginning of the lovers’ destruction is here suspended before it can take place.

This small physical intervention has an enormous conceptual consequence. Andersson does not simply depict an interrupted action. He withholds the action itself. He gives us the conditions for a narrative while leaving its outcome to the viewer. Mother Tongue exists as a possibility rather than an event, brought into being only through our anticipation of what might happen next.

In both sculptures, Christian Andersson makes imagination an essential part of the sculptural experience. In Polaroid, the physical object suggests an absent image. In Mother Tongue, it suggests an absent action. Neither work is visually incomplete in the conventional sense. Rather, both are conceptually open, deliberately withholding the element that would determine their meaning. The viewer becomes an active participant in the sculptural process, mentally supplying what the artist has chosen to leave out.

This interplay between physical form and mental projection brings Andersson’s works into dialogue with the paragone delle arti. While the historical debate considered the respective capacities of painting and sculpture to represent and imitate the world, Andersson shifts the question towards the role of the beholder. What happens when the decisive part of an image or narrative is not represented by the artist but left for the viewer to imagine? In Polaroid, we construct the image and its possible history. In Mother Tongue, we anticipate an encounter that may never take place. In both cases, the work extends beyond its material presence, unfolding in the viewer's intellect.

Andersson thus suggests that the completion of a sculpture doesn’t need to be a material act. An object can be physically resolved while remaining conceptually unfinished, its meaning emerging only through the viewer’s engagement with it. Sculpture becomes a space in which the absent can be imagined and the incomplete mentally resolved. The question is no longer simply what a work of art can show, but how much it can leave unseen while still allowing us to experience it as complete.