ART CITIES:Milan-Silvia Bächli

Silvia Bächli has developed her drawing practice working on sheets of white paper of different sizes, qualities and tones, and using Indian ink, charcoal, gouache or pastels. Using the body and its movements as a starting point, her work spreads into everything that can be considered part of the realm of feeling. In this way she presents a reality made up of fragments and impressions.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: : Galleria Raffaella Cortese Archive

Drawing is the protagonist at the solo exhibition “Verso”, the artist has developed their own drawing practice differently, but with the shared desires to cross the boundaries of the sheet of paper, as well as overcome the limits of the frame and of the two-dimensional surface. After decades of drafting her vision of the world on white sheets of paper of recurring sizes, testing their edges and their surfaces, Silvia Bächli has constructed a vocabulary of brushstrokes that have explored infinite degrees of the black and white and which have entered the world of the specificity of color. While the signs on the wall have always mattered as much as the blank spaces, for this exhibition Bächli investigates even further the surface of the wall that contains her language: for the first time at the gallery, and one of the very first ones in her practice, her drawings float freely, outside of their frames, in new compositions. Lines and larger fields of colors seem to trespass the dimensions of the drawings and merge with the white wall. Her drawings are actions, her lines tell stories. What happens when these meet? What words can describe these encounters? What musical scores could they compose? As visitors walk in the space, they are invited to reconstruct it as they walk along and manage to look at the details of the strokes. The choreography that Bächli imagines exists only in the space, which is not only inhabited, but is newly drawn by the lines and surfaces on paper. The long red lines running horizontally on the frontal wall, through sheets of paper, lead through drawings that are intense spectrums of bright greens, light blues and warm earth tones and then again towards objects that occupy a different kind of physical space. Five sculptures, small angular plaster objects, cut along straight lines, lay on a table of light-colored wood and stand as outlines of human heads. They are part of Bächli’s most recent production and were firstly exhibited in her solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Karlsruhe in 2019: composed of flat, porous surfaces, whose imperfect conjunctions contain the fields of colors, they recall the very same palettes that occupy the walls, and present the very same painterly qualities they own on paper.

Photo: Silvia Bächli, Untitled, 2021, Gouache on paper, 144,3 × 409 cm (8 parts; 72 x 102 cm each), © Silvia Bächli, Courtesy the artist and Galleria Raffaella Cortese

Info: Galleria Raffaella Cortese, via a. stradella 7, Milan Italy, Duration: 20/5-28/8/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-13:00 & 14:30-19:00, https://raffaellacortese.com