Jean-Remy von Matt: Selling Mortality with a Wink.

Advertising has always thrived on urgency. Buy now, last chance, don’t miss out. Few people understood this better than Jean-Remy von Matt, the Swiss-born wordsmith who turned Germany’s billboards into battlefields of wit. His slogans weren’t just clever; they were social weather. “Geiz ist geil” didn’t just move DVD players - it shifted an entire generation’s relationship to consumerism. “Wer hat’s erfunden?” gave Ricola more cultural stickiness than a cough drop ever deserved. And “BILD dir deine Meinung” was less a slogan than a national dare.

So what happens when the Don Draper of Hamburg trades clients for canvases? You might expect a man of his calibre to retreat quietly into patronage, or perhaps into a vineyard that produces overpriced Pinot Noir with a name like “Idee No. 7.” Instead, von Matt decided to do what great advertisers always do: sell us something we didn’t know we needed - only this time, the product is mortality.

From consumer punchlines to existential one-liners

The pivot came not in a boardroom but on a birthday. Alone, von Matt asked himself the kind of question you don’t find in a brand brief: why are we so obsessed with tallying the years we’ve burned, rather than the ones left to live? It’s the sort of question that would die in the mouths of most, but von Matt is not most. His answer became the Carpe Vitam Project - an art series that gives the age-old theme of vanitas a digital, GPS-synced spin.

When your décor piece doubles as a Zen master, a performance artist, and a cosmic prankster with a Swiss sense of humour.

The Carpe Vitam Clock doesn’t behave like a timepiece at all. Carved from oak and anchored with metal, it has the Zen stillness of something you’d expect in a Kyoto temple - until you notice it behaving more like a Berlin performance piece, smirking at you from the corner of the room. It doesn’t tell you when to wake up or when to leave for work; it tells you, with statistical precision, how many seconds remain before you exit stage left. Where advertising once convinced us to panic over “limited stock,” von Matt now offers the ultimate countdown sale: your own life, ticking away in real time.

And because this is von Matt, it comes spiked with wit. When the clock finally hits zero, it doesn’t shut down like a machine at the end of its warranty. It flips the script, begins to count upward, and every ten seconds pops up with the provocation “Lebst du noch?” - a reminder that feels half maternal check-in, half cosmic trolling. It’s as if eternity has developed a sense of humor, and it’s dry, Swiss, and brutally on brand.

Patina, scratches, mortality chic

The clock, hand-hewn in oak and steel, embraces imperfections. Cracks and scratches aren’t defects but part of the work itself. It’s a direct nod to wabi-sabi aesthetics, but also an ironic flex from a man whose slogans once sold flawless lifestyles. If once he peddled glossy images of “my house, my car, my boat,” now he’s giving us wood that bruises and metal that scars - an ad for imperfection, signed by time.

Even the technology plays along: plug it back in anywhere in the world, and thanks to GPS calibration, the clock knows exactly how long you have left. Death, but make it portable.

An old advertiser’s new trick

And yet, the continuity is clear. Von Matt’s career was always about urgency - turning cultural air into lightning bolts of now. Advertising is built on borrowed time: the sale ends Sunday, the campaign fades by Monday. His art strips away the product and leaves the urgency bare. It’s not buy now, it’s live now.

In a way, von Matt has pulled off the slickest pivot of his career - swapping the boardroom for the boneyard. Yesterday he was selling us cars, cough drops, and cable packages; today he’s packaging the one commodity immune to branding: time itself. The Carpe Vitam Clock doesn’t posture as a mere artwork - it behaves like a campaign that never switches off, a looping call to action you can’t scroll past. Which, if you think about it, is perfectly on brand. After all, hasn’t Jean-Remy always been in the business of urgency - only now the deadline is literal?

The punchline

So Jean-Remy von Matt, the man who once put consumerism on a billboard megaphone, now invites us to hang time itself on our wall. Same sharp wit, different target. From “supergeil” to super finite, he’s still writing taglines for our lives - only now the client is death, and the campaign is eternity.

And you have to admire the cheek of it: only an adman could find a way to sell us our own countdown and make us grateful for the reminder.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Jean-Remy von Matt.