A white background and the profile of a person rendered in black paint. The figure appears only sketched, reduced to an essential silhouette: it is wearing a dress but has no face, which is merely outlined, as if the individual were wearing a hood capable of erasing their features. This is the image that Silvia Bächli (1956), Swiss visual artist and photographer, presents to us through an only apparently simple essentiality. The drawing belongs to a series of thirty-three works made in gouache on paper. The purity of the white and the sharpness of the lines project the work into a suspended, almost pristine dimension, where silence and subtraction reign.
The title of the series, Das (This), is both explanatory and generative: it indicates what lies before our eyes, while at the same time opening up the possibility that “this” might transform, become something else, evolve beyond its own visual limit. The word “Das” recalls a fragment by the Danish poet Inger Christensen:
«That. That was it. Now it has begun. It is. It continues. It moves. Fur ther. Evolves. Becomes this and this and this. Goes on as that. Metamorphoses. Expands. Combines other with more and persists as other and more. »
– Inger Christensen, det
Starting from this passage, Bächli’s intent can be perceived more clearly. The artist employs simple, intelligible forms that suggest more than they reveal. What we see is a momentary “this”: a starting point for observation, projection, and interpretation. The image is fixed on the paper only by convention, but beneath its apparent stillness vibrates a tension toward continuous metamorphosis, a desire to free itself from its support and assume new forms.
Silvia Bächli’s Das series shows how minimalism can reveal itself as a powerful language, capable not of reducing, but of expanding meaning. In the artist’s essential gesture lies the desire to restore a space of freedom to the image, removing it from any single, univocal definition. In this way, every outline becomes a threshold and every figure an open process: “This” is never only what it is, but what it can still become.
Das (to Inger Christensen), 1 part of a group of 33, gouache on paper, 44x31cm, 2008.
Courtesy Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Raffaella Cortese Milano, Peter Freeman Inc. New York.
06/12/25
