Le Rhin
September 14–October 26, 2024
For her new Rhine series, Caroline Bachmann embarked on two journeys along the river. If visitors begin their tour of the exhibition on the first floor of Meyer Riegger and then go down to the ground floor, they can follow the course of the river from Reichenau to Rotterdam.
As if looking through the porthole of a ship, a telescope or a keyhole, Bachmann presents her depictions of the Rhine in round frames. One of the most famous round paintings is Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Tondo Doni (1505–06), a portrait of the Holy Family on display in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Like Michelangelo, Bachmann paints on wood. However, the diameter of her work is exactly half that of the Italian Renaissance painting—60 centimetres. While there is only a hint of the landscape in the background of Michelangelo’s work, Bachmann’s paintings are entirely landscape. Although that in itself is nothing new, the decision to start painting landscapes in the 2000s, as Bachmann did, certainly required courage. Still, the question remains as to whether it is possible to add anything new to this art historical genre.
24 views of the Rhine are not that many at all when you compare this figure with the number of pictures of Lake Geneva that Bachmann has painted to date. The artist first began painting the lake at dawn twelve years ago. Although the landscape is the same every time—the mountains, the surface of the water, the sky—each work is unique. In fact, the repetition of this motif leads to a kind of paradox for Bachmann: the more often she paints the same landscape, the less familiar the place feels, and the more interesting it seems to explore through painting.
While she always makes the sketches for her paintings of Lake Geneva from the same position in Cully, the Rhine series portrays the course of the river from different perspectives. Sometimes the Rhine looks more like a rivulet, sometimes it meanders its way between rocks, sometimes it rushes—but mostly it flows calmly and meditatively along.
Whether in motion or not, her method of working always remains the same: she begins by making quick pencil sketches outdoors and noting down the different colours and elements. During her trips along the Rhine, Bachmann produced around 100 of these sketches; she then selected 24 and transformed them into paintings in her studio in Cully. While landscape painters such as Ferdinand Hodler and Giovanni Segantini always painted en plein air, Bachmann prefers to retreat to her “cave”, as she refers to her studio. This separation from the original experience of nature—working in artificial light without a direct view of the landscape—is essential for her painting process, which is very slow.
This way of working means that her paintings are characterised by different experiences of time: the swiftness of sketching gives way to the more laborious painting phase, during which the artist slowly resurrects the spontaneous encounter with nature that she experienced while sketching. This approach, which focuses on the superimposition of different temporal levels, proves that Bachmann does indeed have something to add to the history of landscape painting.
Her paintings enable us viewers to experience time differently. Contrary to its usual linear course, the 24-hour cycle of a day, Bachmann creates temporal connections in her works that are not chronological. She explains: “When it works, it’s as if the painting were suddenly dilating space and time and inviting us, as we stand face to face with it, to be part of all those times at the same time.”[1]
Bachmann’s pictures preserve a feeling. And perhaps they—along with the time she devotes to them—also reflect her respect for the landscape. The bright orange colour at the edge of the image flickers so forcefully that it looks as if it is about to burst. The frame “stops the energy from overflowing, it contains it and allows it to circulate between the painting and me. The time that goes into it is what makes the painting.”[2] If we take some time to look—the average time spent in front of a painting in a museum is just 15 seconds—then perhaps we can fully understand the intensity of this experience of nature.
[1] Caroline Bachmann in conversation with Yann Chateigné Tytelman, “Questions of vision”, in Prix Meret Oppenheim 2022, ed. Swiss Federal Office of Culture (Bern, 2022), p. 211. [2] Julie Enckell (ed.), Caroline Bachmann (Zurich, 2022), p. 47.
