The artists represented at the exhibition have in common both the fact that they primarily want to show their works to the Swiss public, and also the fact that for them the practice of working with paints is the only way to express their thoughts and feelings, going beyond the limits of language. Their work is also represented online via DEL’ARTE Gallery, continuing to reach international audiences beyond physical borders.
Lis Kocher, with her incredibly intense career from surrealist experiments to abstract expressionism now, inspired by Meret Oppenheim, Niki de Saint Phalle and Miriam Kahn, focuses on the power of femininity. She is interested in both the particularity of the bodity and the «seismography» of the inner world, where painting helps to go beyond words as limits. Her works are the largest in the exhibition, presented both in triptychs and in pairs, where the power of color and the energy of the brushstroke literally magnetize our gaze. In contrast to the palette of Lis Kocher’s works, it is worth paying attention to the monochrome paintings of Anna Gigon, gravitating towards automatic writing, liberating the intimacy of the Unconscious. Her works are the result of an artistic game outside the mind, receiving free entry into the symbolic space of an unidentified femininity.
In this deeply experimental company of women artists and their abstract painting techniques, the photorealistic vedutes of Jean-Luc Berger seem sympathetic to metamodernism. The artist himself likes to quote Dostoevsky about the salvation of the world through beauty, which he tries to reflect in his Swiss landscapes with views of Lavaux, Léman and Rivaz. However, he rightly notes that working in advertising, he has really learned that «a picture is worth 100,000 words».
If for him the beauty of Swiss nature is so striking that one can only remain silent, then in the figurative paintings of Olesia Zyppelt silence is a pleasure for athletes in the «Light zone» who have come to train early. The space, filled with the “atmosphere of an epic world, where time seems to stand still,” gives her paintings an architectural monumentality, which she recalls, inspired by the mosaics of the Soviet metro by Alexander Deineka and the murals about the Mexican revolution by Diego Rivera.
But the rather large-scale works of Nataliia Korf-Ivanuyck are built on the reverse of memory. Enlarging national Ukrainian ornaments from hand towels or old wall carpets to textured elements on paintings over a meter high, she seems to be trying to peer into the sweet memories of summer holidays at her grandmother’s house, where it was cozy, delicious and beautiful in an old-fashioned way. To convey this special tactility and decorativeness of the ornaments, Natalia works in a mixed technique of oil painting and graphics.
Evelyne Brader-Frank works with the beauty of the female body and the joy of movement, depicting women dancing in stylized abstractions of the Ancient World and Brancusi’s modernism. Her sculptures are most often torsos — signs, where the beauty of female curves «ala guitar» is emphasized either by the play of marble lines with open air or black paint’ strokes.
For all artists, paints in all their diversity of palettes, used in different working methods and materials from expressionism to naturalism, are an opportunity to tell through painting their very different, but sincere, often even intimate, stories and experiences from their lives.