Visual arts
Pascal Bettex
Born in Basel in 1953, Pascal Bettex discovered kinetic art at ten in front of an exhibition by Jean Tinguely, “those huge rusty machines making the most incredible racket” (24 heures, 4 October 2017). He has lived in Clarens since 1973, in his father’s house, and has devoted himself fully to kinetic art since 1997, in a workshop he named “the cathedral of happiness”. He is the creator of “Allô Claude”, the tribute to Claude Nobs housed in a telephone box.
Pascal Bettex, kinetic art after Tinguely
From the “cathedral of happiness” to square gears
The son of a chemical engineer, Pascal Bettex grew up in Basel before his father bought the house in Clarens where he still lives. “He started smashing everything to rebuild it, it impressed me” he recalls (24 heures, 4 October 2017). From 1991 to 2001 he ran the craft shop Le Cadeau Impossible, where he gradually drifted into kinetic art. He then set up his workshop in a former electrical factory in Montreux, the “cathedral of happiness”, where a sign warns: “You don’t need to be crazy to work here. But it helps.”
Unlike Tinguely, whose noisy machines fascinated him as a child, Bettex favours silent, colourful mechanisms assembled from repurposed old objects and machinery. Since 2016 he has been the first kinetic artist to develop non-circular gears: squares turning clovers, ovals interlocking and driving one another (24 heures). “The aim isn’t to lead people around in circles, but to invite them to ask themselves questions” he sums up, while describing himself as the “specialist in useless things”.
2013: “Allô Claude”, the public’s first prize
In 2013, Pascal Bettex filled an old telephone box with small objects and mechanisms telling the life of Claude Nobs, who had died that January. “Allô Claude” won the public’s first prize at the Biennale de sculpture de Montreux and joined the collection of the Fondation du Montreux Jazz Festival. The installation can be seen today on the Quai Edouard Jacoud.
2025: a tribute for Tinguely’s centenary
For the centenary of Jean Tinguely’s birth, in 2025, Pascal Bettex installed near the Maison de Commune, on the Quai Edouard-Jaccoud, a work built around the cabin of a 75-tonne Sagrave crane, salvaged from Ouchy and deliberately left rusty to recapture “Tinguely’s anarchic and whimsical world”, completed with a miniature replica of his “Eureka”, shown at the 1964 Lausanne Expo. His workshop neighbour Nicolas Bamert, of the Taulan Art Factory, added his touch of colour (mymontreux.ch).