Silvia Bächli

Our perception of the reality around us is very fragmented. In a world of increased speed that feeling has become even stronger when our senses are confronted with endless and meaningless impressions and visual fragments. We think we see a lot but actually we see very little and in a very disconnected way. However, we are forced to penetrate beyond this fragmented surface that is all around us if we want to deepen our understanding and perception. And that requires motivation, concentration and something that is much more important – time – something we do not seem to have in abundance nowadays. But art demands that of you. It needs both time and concentration. It requires that you receive it as a whole so that you can then penetrate beyond its surface visually, emotionally and intellectually into its rich world of experience.

Silvia Bächli´s works present and reveal to us a fragmented world of perception. You see parts of bodies, parts or outlines of landscapes, flowers and things that have the appearance of impressions or shadows of the reality around us. In her works she both strengthens this feeling of fragmentation as well as enhances our perception of what we see. Silvia Bächli makes small and big watercolour drawings that she works with in groups or series. There is a rare magnetic power in each of her works that creates a flowing structure of movement when you see them together. Her works are basically representational but where everything is reduced in simplicity of form. Every line is charged with inner emotional energy, every line is equally important in the totality of the visual experience where the empty surface becomes as significant as the forms themselves. Silvia Bächli´s works have an undertone of both playfulness and uncertainty and they are strangely simple and complicated at the same time. They call for a total awareness. Then they open up like a flower – delicate and sensitive – speaking to us about the fragility of human existence. Silvia Bächli is one of the most significant Swiss artists today working in the medium of drawing and her works have been exhibited extensively in Switzerland and Germany since the early 1980´s. This book is built up like a diary where photos and drawings intermingle and impressions succeed one another. They look narrative but still there is no story. Instead the movement in every image, and the rythmn between them, tells the story.

Bera Nordal, Museum Director

Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skärhamn, Schweden Silvia Bächli 5.2 - 26.3.2006

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Silvia Bächli