GRANDS NUAGES ORANGES REFLET | CAROLINE BACHMANN

An old television, one of those with a curved screen, serves as the frame painted directly on the canvas of the artwork Grands nuages oranges reflet, created by Swiss artist Caroline Bachmann in 2022.
The artwork is an oil painting composed of two elements: the frame, just mentioned, and the content, “projected” inside this kind of television. In the painting, we can observe Lake Geneva from the artist’s perspective, who can see it daily from a window in her house at different times of the day. Although the subject outside the window “frame” is always the same lake, variations in light, perspective, and color make it changeable and potentially infinitely recordable or representable.
Bachmann decides to create an entire series of oil paintings – still ongoing – each different from the others but all depicting the same lake and permeated by the same poetic atmosphere in the inexhaustible attempt to capture the nuances and variations, elusive yet decisive to the eye.

In Grands nuages oranges reflet, it seems to be precisely like looking at the screen of a television that currently projects large orange clouds floating over a lake. The strong orange hue that paints the clouds, as well as part of the water surface, suggests that it is sunset time. The remaining portion of the lake and the sky is colored with a delicate blue tint, effectively contrasting with the orange.
In the background, we can see a mountain range painted in black but outlined by a thin light line along its entire profile: most likely, the sun has just set behind the mountains, placing them in backlight and therefore dark, but not being completely hidden beyond the horizon, it still manages to paint the high clouds in the sky.
It is also worth noting that the upper part of the sky is covered by a dark gray mass – perhaps storm clouds – and that the color division on the lake is strangely sharp, without any gradation.

It’s as if Bachmann had frozen a moment, abstracting it through the painting technique and decontextualizing it with the use of the frame. The detail of the sharp division of the sky and the lake, instead of closing and making the image exhaustive, achieves the effect of turning the painting into an open window to an unknown world, to be imagined and questioned, despite the footholds of reality that can be traced. The laws of nature that Bachmann challenges in the fiction of painting make Grands nuages oranges reflet an invitation to contemplation, guided by a seeing that is an inner gaze, not of retreat but of creation and freedom.

Caroline Bachmann
Grands nuages oranges reflet, 2022
Oil on canvas, 80 x 80 x 2.2 cm (31 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 7/8 in)
© Caroline Bachmann. Courtesy Galerie Gregor Staiger. Property of Swiss Confederation, Federal Office of Culture, Bern.

06/12/2023