Hannes Schüpbach
2021Falten
Hannes Schüpbach
In the form of folds: separate areas of a piece of fabric come together, touching in new ways, at new angles. Individual sections come forward while others remain hidden. In motion, the surface of a cloth gleams like the delicate impression of light in film. The French experience includes forms from nature that are discovered, singled out or artificially employed. And parallel to this is the search for the natural in art. Leaves and flowers appear as if drawn. One’s own hand becomes an object, a figure. How are the leaves arranged on a tree? It is a culture of the aesthetic, in the original sense of that which refers to perception.
Falten
Instants
Hannes Schüpbach
Exquisitely shot on 16mm in the French countryside near Avignon, Hannes Schüpbach's Instants explores the nature of spontaneous time as related to the thinking of French writer Joël-Claude Meffre, transcending portraiture as it not only records the poet working, but also develops a memory of its own.
Instants
Toccata
Hannes Schüpbach
“Il tocco” means not only “touch”; it can also mean a small quantity, a single brushstroke in painting, the striking of a bell or of piano keys. The surroundings meet the eye. Direct touch releases an interior impulse. Surfaces open to states of being. Out of this encounter arises the image. From the images, an inner place. In the film as in consciousness, the distances of spaces and bodies, the layerings of time conjoin. A house, a city in Italy, traffic, and the movements of people are visibly filmed in the present. But the images embrace a living continuity. The light of one day links my eyes to the eyes of someone who lived here, in the same city, two, three, or five hundred years ago. On a church wall, a sculptor has left an arched curtain in stone. Through the rhythm of its inward and outward foldings, the film becomes “still.”
Toccata
Spin
Hannes Schüpbach
The concept of Spin, the inherent turning momentum of electrons, stands for the passing of time and for time itself. The unceasing transformation of the world is translated into film via the gliding movement of the camera. Bright light and blurring portray the environment of the film’s elderly subject, my mother, as pure atmosphere. Her few calm gestures in the face of diminishing time and energy convey a personal presence undisturbed by specific goals. She sits and breathes quietly. When walking she travels across space. The turning away of a tree full of apples evokes regret, as does a sharp light that narrows and dissolves. In the final image my mother seems to taste a bitterness that eludes comprehension.
Spin
L'atelier
Hannes Schüpbach
Sight and Thought. In the passage of days, inner advancement thus corresponds with a piece of the outer world, the real condition that allows the inner digression and enables the artist to return again to this window, this tree, the house across from here. In the “drawing” on film, described by the gestures of the recorded image, the physical space itself becomes the work. The space evolves in a counterplay to internal movement. Following an insight, a glance falls on one object, then another. This aspect of the texture of the work that connects the sight of objects with the movement that lies within them, leads me to think admiringly of the two painters Paul Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard: Cézanne, the master of line and the “painterly quantum,” who depicts space as a reality composed of individual moments; Bonnard, the master of painting an animated space.
L'atelier
Verso
Hannes Schüpbach
Verso — turning to things and landscapes, reading them. A movement along things, as if tracing written lines, in order to understand or to grasp, take up, collect them—keeping them around, sustained in memory. There, they continue to rearrange and refocus into sharp or nearly sharp images. These slip and shift, allowing room for a new direction. All the gaze can hold is the single motif from a movement that continues onward. It is my father who stands up. He wants to see. This impulse draws multiple lines—in getting up, in crossing a field of stones, then in the descent of a memory, in slipping and piecing together.
Verso
