For Silvia Bächli the medium of drawing is a compellingly valid, rich and complex form of artistic expression in its own right. She draws with great regularity on mostly small and medium-sized sheets of paper. Her preferred means of expression are crayon, ink or gouache.



The quantities of pictures that steadily emerge in a work process of calm concentration are subjected at regular intervals to the artist's stringent examination. The works that bear up under her critical scrutiny become the "building blocks" of installations of drawings, whose often wall-sized layout is fine-tuned in her studio with exceptional patience and intuition. Bächli assembles her figurative motifs (parts of bodies, fragments of architecture, objects of daily use, etc.) in such fashion that relationships of content and form between single drawings gradually come to the fore in an associative dialogue with imaginative viewer. The meticulously calibrated configurations of her delicate and fragile drawings function like "atonal sound imagery" whose impact is both fascinating and disturbing. At the same time they combine an enigmatic brittleness with a deeply moving immateriality and weightlessness. The character and quality of the extremely personal imagery that has taken shape in her work over the past two decades resembles diary-like notations in which memory and experience, products of the imagination and seen realities are inextricably intertwined.



Silvia Bächli has substantially expanded the focus of her work. Large formats, consistently measuring 200 x 150 cm, initially showed carpets of floral motifs but later presented simple grids and networks of horizontally and vertically drawn, intersecting and superimposed lines. The large-format drawings make a more decorative and sensual impression than the small-format works although they are created with the same conscious economy of artistic means that yields an atmosphere of meditative poetry and spiritual musicality.



Martin Schwander