Solo show at the Whitehouse Gallery 15.09 - 20.10.2019

We can consider the Coded Intimacy sculptures, which were created at the European Ceramic Centre in Oisterwijk, the Netherlands, as a thorough reflection on the artistic object – a tangible form that takes its place within a gallery space or living room – in an era of digitisation, ‘transparency’ and tension between the personal and the public. Whereas social media tends to blur the boundaries between private and public until we ‘share’ almost everything with almost everyone, including our most intimate thoughts and images, Baechler goes back to the motif of the paravent, the folding screen that in previous centuries was intended to establish a sense of intimacy within sitting rooms and bedrooms or artists’ studios. This obsolete object is now given a new lease of life in Baechler’s ceramic screens.
Whereas the computer screen literally and figuratively functions as a barrier between us and the real world – which it does, however, intend to unlock, and thus to make visible and known – Baechler erects a dam with each of her sculptures, an opaque wall that is extremely tactile. This material wall is infinitely more present than the screens of our iPads and smartphones, no matter how much the latter pretend to be touchable – they work even when we don’t touch them.

Eric Min, August 2019; Pictures by Hugard & Vanoverschelde