Whereas the mountains in Swiss art have always occupied a central position in national iconography and, in their powerfulness and inalterability, have been regarded as a constantly recurring symbol of the original Helvetian character, they have recently figured increasingly as a metaphoric territory in which the contradictions in the behaviour of post-industrial man towards nature and the landscape are shown in a particularly conspicuous and suspense-filled fashion.
In his "Snow Management" photographs, Jules Spinatsch has created an impressive document of the post-modern development of the Alps into a leisure theme park. In precisely illuminated and somewhat eerie scenes, he has given a visible form to the alienation of man and the artificiality of his consumption of nature. Prototypical of the "mountain entertainment industry", his work contains shadowy images that, in their alienation and absurdity, express the complex and bizarre relationship of urban man with the mountains. |
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Cécile Wick, on the other hand, took a different course, tracing the remains of sublimity and mystery that the mountains have retained as a myth robbed of its magic in monochrome, black and white or delicately tinted light-dark images. She seeks deserted landscapes, unspoilt nature that appears to have resisted the interventions of civilisation, although they have long since been more of a memory than a wilderness. Her occasional use of "primitive" techniques and blurring, as well as of classical image composition express the remembered character of the landscape, at the same creating a vivid poetry and beauty that the medium has almost lost.
The combination of pathos and absurdity, a longing for nature and remoteness from reality, is the basis of Nicolas Faure's ironic visual criticism. In his photo essay, taken over several decades, he shows the average "mountain enthusiast" as a neon visual disturbance in the mountain panorama. In his recent group of works, entitled "Les jeux |
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sont faits", on the other hand, he seeks the scene of his childhood memories in the landscape. With himself as an 2/3 adult in the woods of his childhood, Nicolas Faure reviews his inner images in the light of their relevance to the present in a sometimes melancholy, sometimes mischievous fashion, and tries to bring his longing in line with reality. No one in recent times has created a more convincing document of the touching uselessness of "back to nature" without falling into a simplistic visual thinking.
The vertigo, or "vertige" (fear of heights, summit meeting), emerges from the common theme of the mountain landscape. Whereas a fear of heights and dizziness may be regarded as possible reactions to the direct experience of height, "vertige" may also be a metaphor for the different strategies devised by the Swiss artists Jules Spinatsch, Cécile Wick and Nicolas Faure in their work with mountains. All three revolve repeatedly around the theme of the mountains in |
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different ways, as a motif and as a cliché, as impressions and symbolic interpretations. They are drawn into a whirlpool of iconographic traditions, brace themselves against them, make new use of them and create as yet unexplored accesses to the motif that is so often used in Swiss art and advertising. |
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