27/5/17
I took a bus ride to the Centre Culturel Suisse, in the Marais district, to see Silvia Bächli and Eric Hattan’s installation Situer la différence.
I first encountered Bächli and Hattan, at their show at MK Gallery in 2013 ‘What about Sunday?’. Hattan describes himself and Bachli as contemporary flaneurs, ‘We walk around and see things and remember them.’ Their work is always linked to the site of exhibition in some way, with a preparatory visit which led to new drawings and films, for the MK show and with a changing and specific three stage installation in Paris this summer. There is a lightness about their work, a sense of the uninterfered observation of the overlooked everyday, this is then evident in their elemental approach to art making.
Viewing Bachli’s drawings and paintings, with their seemingly understated fragments and quiet memories, requires the viewer to pay more attention to the reading them. Reminding me of the Partenheimer book I was reading yesterday, where Werner Schnell writes:
“Partenheimer is able to make his drawings operate on several different levels. They demand from us a complexity of approach, for they refuse to be depictive in the conventionally accepted sense. Thus it is above all its syntax, which is the vehicle of meaning.’ Whilst we know that this complexity of approach may help us towards an understanding of the world, we also know that like the syntactical structure of the language spoken by Partenheimer’s drawings and paintings is made up of abstract forms invented at the very moment the artist draws and paints them.”
I want to wander in the ordinary, look and hold my gaze in the peripheral. Slow down the looking. Watch and feel the movements around me, listen to the sounds patterns.
Back at the table, I wonder how to bring something to the, ‘strange torture of the blank sheet of paper, where you must open a window that is not the one you just spotted just now but one equally insistent in its truthfulness’ Julien Green Paris, 1983, Penguin Modern Classics
I am posting some one minute videos that log some of this looking on Instagram @marion_piper
