室内景观 (PAYSAGES INTÉRIEURS)

室内景观 (PAYSAGES INTÉRIEURS) 18.03 - 23.04.2023 Curated by Yimei Zhang and Neda Zanetti
 Opening: Saturday 18 March 2023 from 17:00 Opening times: Fridays and Saturdays 15-19:00 by appointment: [email protected] With Artists: Caroline Bachmann, Vera Trachsel, Enea Toldo and Yuwei Gong La Rada - a space for contemporary art in Locarno is pleased to present 室内景观 (PAYSAGES INTÉRIEURS) a group exhibition curated by Yimei Zhang and Neda Zanetti. The exhibition 室内景观 (PAYSAGES INTÉRIEURS) presents the work of Caroline Bachmann, Vera Trachsel, Enea Toldo and Yuwei Gong, artists who transform physical places into inner landscapes where they explore their relationship with surrounding world. The landscape becomes the starting point where the textures of painting intersect with the concrete and organic world, blurring the border separating the natural and the artificial, and experimenting with ways of inhabiting the environment. These landscapes arise from a subjective view of nature that makes them sensitive and emotional representations. They are thus interior but also interior, enclosed and folded into the exhibition rooms that house them. At the same time, they carry with them the marshy and earthy expanses they represent, moving away from the hectic and static urban space that contains them to bring forth the possibility of a slow, natural cycle: that of the growth of plants and the succeeding seasons. These pictorial landscapes, therefore, have the power to evoke a natural and intimate space-time. The visible resonances between the works hint at the possibility of a synchronic link that brings them together around the same signifying horizon, beyond all geographical and historical causality. It is, such synchronicity, "the surfacing of symbolic parallelisms" that, according to Jung, "cannot be explained without recourse to the hypothesis of the collective unconscious" (Jung, The Synchronicity). The wild entanglements and quiet horizons are thus imbued with a common symbolic sphere: the works of the four artists "set the world on its way, arouse the forces that swell forms, provoke the forces asleep in the flat universe" (Bachelard, Paysages. Albert Flocon). But above all, they set us on a journey toward ecosystems where nature is no longer sacrificed and circumscribed but nests in our everyday gestures, renewing the need for an intimate and spontaneous connection with nature. The paintings by Caroline Bachmann selected for the exhibition 室内景观 (PAYSAGES INTÉRIEURS) belong to two series on which the artist has been working since 2013 in slow and multiple processes that leads her to work on several canvases simultaneously: views of Lake Geneva and live portraits of Swiss and international artists. The artist plays with the frontier of her subjectivity by externalizing it. Her paintings thus reveal her view of the world, of green mountains and luminous water as well as of relaxed faces that become atmospheric and physiognomic places... Vera Trachsel's poetics interrogates the visibility of the creative gesture in the material it transforms and shapes into landscapes dominated by movement. It is precisely through movement that the artist manages to combine and suspend the opposition in everyday antitheses, where the artificial becomes natural, the light heavy, the palpable impalpable, and reality opens up to dreams. Her textile installations reorganize the exhibition spaces in a playful, vertiginous promenade where the duration is that of crossing. Enea Toldo's creative process is realized through the creation of monumental canvases that condense preparatory sketches, fragments in which one can observe the fluidity of his meticulous stroke. The artist prepares the pictorial support with a mixture of clay, sand, and straw in order to create an irregular and organic material capable of accommodating the forms of fragile vegetation, now close to extinction. His paintings thus bear the traces of an inexorable as well as cyclic succession where annulment and rebirth join together. Yuwei Gong's drawings emerge from his everyday life, from the places he frequents such as flea markets and antique shops. In the objects he finds, an encounter between present and past manifests itself where time is layered, now circular thanks to the possibility of return. It is thus that the old sheets and cards are updated to accommodate the tones of blues, greens, and purples with which Yuwei restores the forests and rivers of the different Chinese regions he explores. They are fleeting, remembered landscapes that crystallize on paper, now persistent - or present.