silvia bächli - nähern

silvia bächli - nähern
18.09.2018 - 22.11.2018

Galleria Raffaella Cortese is pleased to announce the third solo-show by Silvia Bächli since 2013, year of their first collaboration.

Swiss artist active since the ‘80s, Bächli has dedicated her research to drawings that balance abstraction and hints at the figurative, narration and action. A glossary of lines, grids, and movements in continuous evolution characterizes her distinctive production, a devoted investigation in ceaseless transformation. The genesis is to be traced in reality, in the day to day, in the accidental: an invisible region of emotions and impressions that are formalized in a language that is intrinsically tied to the medium.

Bächli’s minimal and immediate approach reveals a code of signs, shapes, and spaces characterized by synthesis, control of gestures, measured balance, and yet preserving something unfinished.

The presence of the artist is embodied in the pressure of the brushstrokes, in the interruptions, densities and shades of the gouache. The boundaries of her agency on the sheets of paper correspond to the corporal dimension, while the composition, as the pauses, evoke an assonance to music: In the music, the silence is just as important as the notes played (Silvia Bächli, 2018).

Nähern, German verb for the action of bringing, drawing closer together, is the result of a decades-long research on paper by the artist. Infallible brushstrokes tell of an imaginary that floats among a language of “eyes, irregular bodies, duplications, clothes, architectures, structures”, as Konrad Bitterli writes in the text of the catalogue far apart - close together at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, 2012. Bächli inflects this language in active forms, through verbs that describe the actions of the body moving, feeling, standing, painting, relating, of arms spreading. The actions are those of the medium and necessarily human: lines cross the paper alongside one another, merge into each other and, carefully, design an encounter and a dialogue between subjects.

On the occasion of the show at the gallery, recent works testify the continuity of her research in constant progress:

I am less and less interested in narratable stories with a beginning and an end - Bächli writes - The ephemeral between the stories, the tone are becoming more important to me, with all their gaps, all that is unsaid, the allusions, the pauses … The stories which cannot be tamed by words. Stories are born from intersecting lines, flowing next to one another, without ever crossing. The drawings do not intend to represent but to suggest:
There are states for which we have no words - continues Bächli - but which can still become a picture (Silvia Bächli, 2018).