BIEL/BIENNE.- Since the Romantic period, it has been customary to say that a painted landscape reflects the soul of the artist who created it. The truth of painting would therefore reside less in the natural arrangement of forms and colors than in the feelings—at times joyful or melancholy, at times euphoric or tormented—of the human psyche.
In contrast to this subjective conception of landscape, Caroline Bachmann’s (*1963) approach to painting is more akin to that of a scientist, based on observing her surroundings with rigorous detachment.
Until now devoted exclusively to Swiss lakes and mountains, her painting is nevertheless imbued with a strong dreamlike sensuality. The painter’s attention is wholly focused on atmospheric and luminous variations: the particular texture of a cloud, the weight of a celestial body, the distinctive reflections of a wave.
It is also worth noting that these paintings contain neither humans nor animals. No buildings appear, no trace of life can be seen, and there is not the slightest narrative imprint. These landscapes belong to geological time and seem almost to come from another planet.
The strange painted frames surrounding these compositions further reinforce this sense of distance, as though we were observing these landscapes through some particular device—a porthole? A screen? The lens of a telescope or microscope?
Behind their apparent simplicity, it becomes clear that these paintings-within-paintings actually question our position as viewers, in a barely disguised reference to the obscure American painter Louis Michel Eilshemius and, through him, to Marcel Duchamp—two artists for whom Caroline Bachmann has immense admiration.
For her exhibition in Biel/Bienne, the painter presents a new series devoted to Geneva Lake, a body of water located in Wisconsin, United States, which, apart from its name, has nothing in common with Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
Originally named “Kishwauketoe” by the Potawatomi, the lake was renamed in the 1830s in the wake of Swiss immigration to the Midwest. By choosing it as her subject, Bachmann encourages us to consider Geneva Lake not simply as an immutable topographical entity, but also as a surface capable of receiving imaginary projections and dramatic narratives—beginning with the violent expulsion of Indigenous nations.
It is this multiple history that “Distances are approximate,” the text by Nicolas Garait-Leavenworth accompanying the exhibition, sets out to tell.
Structured in five chapters, a prologue and an epilogue, and composed of heterogeneous, more or less fictional fragments—film scenarios, excerpts from novels, newspaper articles, news stories, notebook entries and more—it conveys the particularly complex cultural fabric layered over the peaceful lakeside landscapes.
It can thus be understood as a kind of soundtrack or podcast to be listened to during this walk along the lake. It might equally be the painter’s interior monologue upon returning to the studio, as she attempts to replay on the surface of the canvas the fleeting compositions glimpsed some time earlier.
At a time when place names have become the absurd argument of a brutal and grotesque diplomacy, this exhibition should encourage us to question what shapes our perception of landscape: in its immediate observation, in its narratives, and in its memory.
