Untitled, 2003

West studied and began to devote himself to art in Vienna during the period of the Aktionismus movement, but he soon denounced the hermeticism and even the social hypocrisy that characterized its internal dynamics. He turned his interest, instead, to sculpture, but not understood in the traditional, inviolate sense of the work’s formal completeness. His works, beginning with the Adaptives series, truly come into being when they are used, and thus brought to life by the viewer. Art, for West, principally has a value of use. It must be touched and activated, and this is the primary reason why the artist entrusts his pictorial and graphic production with a parallel role, connoted above all by irony and social commentary, to his sculptural works, whose three-dimensionality, occupying the space of the real world, seeks to annul the presumed ontological difference of the art object. [...]