The painter Caroline Bachmann and her “cave” of Lake Geneva

2023-08-05 13:00:03
Caroline Bachmann in her studio, in Cully (Switzerland). DOROTHÉE THEBERT FILLIGER

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She grew up in the house next door, with exactly the same view overlooking Lake Geneva. Water in the foreground, steep contours in the distance and the sky: the view from a window in artist Caroline Bachmann’s living room in Cully, a village nestled by the lake, ten minutes train from Lausanne (Switzerland), is immediately recognizable when you know his painting. It is the landscape that appears in a stylized form on most of his canvases, with an almost magical atmospheric intensity.

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Her studio, which she calls her « caves », is located a few minutes walk away: it is an old forge where she works set back from any visual relationship with nature. Because the essential is played upstream, in front of its east-facing window: “I work at dawn, between 3 and 6 am. When something interesting happens, a sudden tension between the elements, which touches me, I make a very quick sketch in pencil on an A4 sheet, with annotations of color and values. » Sheets that she dates and puts away in a drawer. It is from this reserve of captures that she draws when she launches a new series of paintings − always seven or eight canvases at a time, in various formats, “to vary the pleasures and challenges”.

For her, nature offers an incredible potential for renewal. “The filter of the drawing is very important for me, because I will base all the painting on it, far from any naturalism”, she explains. Having grown up there, the physical sensations related to colors or winds are “sedimented” in his brain. “By intuitively interpreting the landscape, I feel like a kind of medium that would be bringing out something that is linked to my time and my experiences. I do not have a great influence on this zone of poetic evocation, but to summon it, I must leave an enormous space of freedom”, emphasizes the painter. Between memory and reunion, she patiently reactivates these moments “almost existential” with oil paint diluted with water.

A self-taught career

Ironically, this lake setting that irrigates her work today is the one she has always sought to flee: “From the age of 12, I began to dream of only one thing: to go behind these mountains which close my horizon. In Switzerland, you feel in an enclosed place and I felt the call of the open sea. » After studying graphic design at the Decorative Arts in Geneva, she went to work in Barcelona as a graphic designer then, aspiring to more freedom of expression, left for Rome in the early 1990s to start a career as a self-taught artist. .

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