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Silvia Bächli: Side facing the wind

Silvia Bachli, Side facing the wind, Culturgest Porto - Fotos Alexandre Delmar (12).jpg
Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva

 

The Rite Of Autumn

 

The exhibition Side facing the wind, by Silvia Bächli, is like a breath of fresh air. Her studio-elaborated language of earth-tones flat brushstrokes in gouache on white sheets of paper inhabits the gallery rooms with a breezy energy. Here is a series of horizontal soil-red coloured lines running across the walls like musical scores, which reappear throughout the exhibition as a refrain. There are minimal stick-like figures running together in asphalt colours, as if hinting at a joyful trot to escape an autumnal drizzle. Or perhaps they are crossroads seen from above, some kind of archaic symbols for contemporary roads intersecting. And indeed, some drawings are rather busy with overlaps, as if reflecting the dense arteries of a big city, and some sheets of paper are nearly bare, as if zooming in a countryside path and its byways against a sky so bright it is blindingly white. Other sheets feature multiple wavy lines, reminiscent of the outlines of imagined rice terraces, or they could be spider silks left behind by some awesome cartoonish arachnid or intangible-made-visible tectonic plate boundaries. Your impressions are as good as mine.

 

Bächli’s work is a visual response to her physical observations in the moment of painting in the studio. She looks at her own hand with its fingers spreading when holding the paper—in fact, one drawing nearly looks like a six-fingered hand—and her own perception of her body. And it is also a response to her memories, from observations she made while doing something else, somewhere else—I heard she remembers walks and movement—for which of course we will never have an exact translation. Not that we should need one, since these unframed paintings stuck directly to the walls, at various heights and places, some shown in groups, some by themselves, speak a poetic language generous as a whole. They form an installation-composition of hand-drawn autumn-coloured strokes, as musical accents and scores, claiming their spot in the cosmos of poetry with its mysteries and expressive voids, emotions and musical fluidity. 

 

Sculptures are more recent in Bächli’s work. But we are here lucky to have a nice group of them set on a high table in the last room of the exhibition space. They are made in plaster, remnants of walls that the artist then broke down further and added some earthy tones to. Their materiality absorbs our gaze in a grounding way, balancing the more agitated energy of the drawings. Some of these uneven geometric blocks are stacked on top of each other, forming naive humanoid shapes—fittingly, we learn from the exhibition text that Bächli refers to her artworks as actors—and gather, converse with each other, or just are, as if some forest or desert totem-fairy beings had been conjured by Bächli’s visually musical artistic practice. And so, like poetry and music, these works are biographical yet abstract, and they are also open to anyone’s very personal Jungian analysis and/or emotional and bodily readings. In fact, Bächli is known to compare herself to a composer and the audience to musician-interpreters.

 

To me, colours of autumn leaves and grasses come to mind, which is just as good and timely. Likewise, a city flânerie that would include lively gardens and wet pavements—patches of greens and browns appear on the white walls—but also Kandisky’s synaesthesia, sounds and elements from nature, and the manicured yet stunning characteristics of a Swiss landscape (I can’t help but imagine the artist’s environment). And then there is a multitude of other fragmented ideas that come by association that would be as easy to describe as I would a dream, and just as personal and irrelevant in this context.

 

If we accept that colour and form can be powerful triggers for emotional responses, without the need for them to be representational, this show prompts a joyful feeling of freedom. Interestingly, in her forty years of drawing practice, Bächli often only used a palette of greys in prior exhibitions. But here colours seem to each be given an equal importance, in a nearly democratic display. And so is white, which, if we agree to see her works as actors, seems to have its own main role to play. White could be representing silences and pauses in a much-needed way, just like when writing music. It becomes this negative-positive space that structures a visual melody, enhancing the different hues and strokes and giving them shape and purpose.

 

Ultimately, Bächli’s drawing installations disregard the boundaries imposed by the rectangular papers on which she draws, and the white of the paper merges with the white of the wall: it is the fascia of the body of work, the silence that links its visual-sounds together. In the conclusion of the exhibition, the rhythm halts, probably because we are stopped in our tracks by the platform on which her small sculptures reside. One could argue it is just but an imaginary clearing where a concert is about to take place, and where us as viewers are joined by the various characters present in Bächli’s work, to rest and listen.

 

Silvia Bächli

Culturgest

 

Fidelidade Arte

 

 

Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva  is an art critic, curator and writer. She is a regular international contributor to art publications such as Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and other publications including the South China Morning Post. She was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hong Kong-based independent art magazine Pipeline that ran print editions form 2011 to 2016 where she curated thematic issues with artists, curators and other art contributors. She has a Masters degree in International Prospective from Paris V University. She is the editor-in-chief of Curtain Magazine.

 

Proofreading: Diogo Montenegro

 

Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (13)
Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (15)
Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (11)
Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (12)
Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (8)
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Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (7)
Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (6)
Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (9)
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Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (23)
Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (18)
Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (24)
Silvia Bachli_Fidelidade Arte_ Photos by Bruno Lopes (27)
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Silvia Bächli: Side facing the wind. Exhibition views at Fidelidade Arte, Lisbon. Photos: Bruno Lopes. Courtesy of Culturest/Fundação CGD.

Silvia Bachli, Side facing the wind, Culturgest Porto - Fotos Alexandre Delmar (4)
Silvia Bachli, Side facing the wind, Culturgest Porto - Fotos Alexandre Delmar (3)
Silvia Bachli, Side facing the wind, Culturgest Porto - Fotos Alexandre Delmar (7)
Silvia Bachli, Side facing the wind, Culturgest Porto - Fotos Alexandre Delmar (8)
Silvia Bachli, Side facing the wind, Culturgest Porto - Fotos Alexandre Delmar (1)
Silvia Bachli, Side facing the wind, Culturgest Porto - Fotos Alexandre Delmar (6)
Silvia Bachli, Side facing the wind, Culturgest Porto - Fotos Alexandre Delmar (2)
Silvia Bachli, Side facing the wind, Culturgest Porto - Fotos Alexandre Delmar (5)
Silvia Bachli, Side facing the wind, Culturgest Porto - Fotos Alexandre Delmar (10)
Silvia Bachli, Side facing the wind, Culturgest Porto - Fotos Alexandre Delmar (9)

Silvia Bächli: Side facing the wind. Exhibition views Culturgest, Oporto. Photos: Alexandre Delmar. Courtesy of Culturest/Fundação CGD.

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