Silvia Gertsch
After years in Zurich and Bergamo/ITA, Silvia Gertsch (*1963 Bern) now lives and works in Rüschegg near Schwarzenburg.
Her paintings are captured moments painted behind glass. While the artist stands in front of the glass, her arm reaches around the glass and paints its back. Every brushstroke, every dab of color must sit, because there is no overpainting, no correcting. Everything is binding, definitive. With the utmost discipline and concentration, she forgets the world around her in order to devote herself to her subjects. The image templates, mostly cell phone snapshots or video stills, are created on her rambles. Children, young people in their free time and everyday life, bathers, natural landscapes or nocturnal scenes are her motifs. With her camera she captures moments that point beyond the momentary to the everlasting and universal.
Silvia Gertsch shows us a window to a silent, pure and bright light that reveals itself on dancing waves or in sparkling drops of water, a living force that touches us in our innermost being and transports us as if to a better world. Neither words nor mere intellect can describe this power. Only those who can free themselves from the noise and bustle of everyday life are touched and carried along by it.
In the transformation of the templates into reverse painting on glass, in which the immaterial light is represented by means of color, pictures are created in which the figures and objects are immersed in a dreamlike, mysterious atmosphere. She virtuously captures the light, shadow and color as she paints. Silvia Gertsch’s paintings shine out of themselves and draw the viewer with their high color and light intensity in a miraculous way under their spell. As a painter, Silvia Gertsch succeeds in the miracle of lending credibility and duration to beauty that we block out in photographic snapshots as ephemeral cheap show effects. This delicate and at the same time strong beauty is revealed in her painting alone.
Finally, the artist has always been fascinated by the phenomena and magic of light, and by means of her reverse painting on glass, she once again gives them their own emerging artistic form of haunting intensity.
“The light that I see and experience in the world, I try to give expression. I give it form and color and thereby let it emerge from the darkness.”
