Raffaella Cortese is proud to present a solo show by the Swiss artist Silvia Bächli which will occupy both gallery spaces in Via Stradella 1 and Via Stradella 7.

For the artist, “Drawing is a moving of eyes, a light gap, an almost undetectable discontinuity in a gravitational field of slippery care towards objects and dreams, which doesn’t even totally stop on paper. Drawing means discovering unknown worlds where to wander, creating a space and exploring it, by acting with and against the paper edges.”

Her drawing practice is almost ritual and develops into two steps: at first, a spontaneous creation with simple shapes, and abstract or figurative tones, and then a careful and reflective construction. The result consists of works characterized by a shaded, nearly monochrome line, light and clear on the paper surface. Bächli’s conception of space is representative of another dimension, it opens windows on the world of perception, sensation and interiority, which is grasped just for a second and it vanishes or turns into something else immediately after.

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. The result is not just painterly moment; the drawings often seem to capture, as if in film stills, a cinematic way of looking at bodies and things or their details, at landscapes, gestures, structures and processes.

The exhibition shows drawings, paintings on paper of different sizes and techniques using gouache, acrylic and ink.

The gallery space in Via Stradella 1 houses the installation “Hafnargata”, a photographic project conceived and realized with Silvia Bächli’s partner, the Swiss artist Eric Hattan, deriving from their explorative four-month journey to Iceland in 2008. “Hafnargata” was first shown in 2011, when they exhibited together in “Schnee bis im Mai” at Kunsthalle Nürnberg .