Silvia Bächli: Silvia Bächli

Maisterra is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Madrid by the Swiss artist Silvia Bächli. This exhibition is made up of 19 works on paper made on the occasion in an exhibition space adapted to the circumstances.

 

From the beginning of the 80’s, Silvia Bächli has applied to her drawings some qualities that apparently do not match their nature and are more on the side of synesthesia: vibrant colors become sounds, winding lines take an almost tactile human shape, and the whitish paper is not a surface anymore, but emptiness.

 

These qualities, closer to sculpture as a discipline that joins together movement and sound, are sought after by the artist with the aim of taking distance from the qualities that belong to the language of drawing, such as the composition, style and the relationship between shape and background. On the contrary, Bächli tries to find relationships outside an autonomous representation system, her drawings being reverberations of small ordinary things where accident, change and surprise are constant.

 

Ordinary life, as a space of random situations, is made of an ongoing number of actions, phenomena or places continuously repeated (a conversation, a horizon, a crossing of arms...); the context makes their meaning change every time they happen, turning the action into repetitive but unique at the same time. Bächli treats her drawings as if they were those repeating actions and the exhibition space as the contexts that makes them never be the same.

 

For Bächli, the exhibition is as important a narrative element as the image shown in the drawing: she always creates a mock-up of the exhibition space, she adds it to her activity in the studio, and, in an organic way, drawings find their system of relationships with the new context. Those spaces beyond the paper limits make the drawings behave as groups of fragments that, like our daily actions, seek to get completed beyond their own image.

 

Another constant element for relationships found in Bächli’s drawings is the artist’s own body print. We can see how the color of lines and spots fade or intensify as we feel the pressure of the artist’s arm, hand and fingers; we see how those veiled changes in color are not a representation, there is not an anecdote; they arise from a physical action in a specific moment, from a body with specific characteristics.