(I)
Enrico Bach’s art epitomizes the geometrical abstract paintings through the use of straight lines, diagonal lines, parallel lines, intersecting lines and rectangles, thin rectangles, triangles, curves, polygons, which are represented in the combination of silvery grey, bluish grey, red, neon red and green. He seems not to be concerned about the mechanical nuances even though his works are hand-painted. All of the parallel lines, regardless of the length and quantity, are juxtaposed parallelly. Whether it is a gradient of colour or a series of lines changing in value from white to dark, each is as precise as print. In particular, the measures of the sides, the combination of lines, colours, and shapes are brilliantly exquisite and astounding. Indeed, his paintings typify the strictness and vigour of German.
However, Enrico Bach’s art features a distinctive style compared with the abstract paintings that people have experienced, which always remind the viewers of some moments in modern urban life that they have acquaintance with. The objects — such as a modern building, a dark street corner, the cover of a book, a pile of randomly stacked files, a series of fragments of a building façade, an open book on a simplistic shelf — are characterized by a sort of subtlety, sensibility, and vividness. Even these geometric lines in the fluorescent background feature a striking sensibility of a structure as if a surreal structure tranquilly stands in the equally surreal atmosphere.
The subtle-looking everyday images are different from the works of classicism, impressionism, and expressionism which present a defining humanistic touch in the various visual productions, such as the simple, delicate side-lines as if being cut by a machine, the cool colour tones resembling industrial paint, the texture looking as cold as metal, silk, thin paper. All of this indicates a refined, glamorous mechanical beauty that is unique to the age of industrial development, which is well-organized, sophisticated, elegant and somewhat suggests a touch of warmth as well. This seems to be a paradox: Enrico Bach’s paintings appear to calmly and serenely showcase the diverse beauty of everyday life in the age of industrial development in a grand, solemn way of an altarpiece or a sensitive, delicate manner of a poet.
(II)
In the early 20th century, artists including Picasso took the lead in relocating the everyday visual impressions from modern art in the name of modernity. What they drew from the Industrial Age, however, was simply the simplest forms of structure. In effect, it was their singular talents for hand painting and humanistic approaches that resisted the Industrial Age that was mechanical and indifferent. In the 1950s and 1960s, Warhol among others introduced the visual imagery of the Industrial Age to the realm of art on a large scale, indicating the advent of an era of objects visualization to the fullest. Within the carnival of objects that lasted for half a century, although many artists have showcased a wide array of objects that are exhilarating or gloomy and cold as a result of the Industrial Age, there has been only a few artists like Enrico Bach, who continues to portray the “industrial beauty” in a poetic sense.
Enrico Bach was born in Leipzig, 1980. While the artist began his independent art career, the German art scene had gradually retreated from Neo-expressionism and the criticism of society and influence of the old Leipzig School. Now it is an era where the rage of passions of society has gone, and where the increasingly more sophisticated machines serve as creators and dominate people’s domestic space and annihilate people’s lyrical and poetic sensibilities in the inner world. However, Enrico Bach has keenly discovered the lyrical tones exclusive to the “materialized” era; through a variety of lines, colours, textures that symbolize the exquisiteness of industrial inventions, his work mutely reveals the struggles in the era while it utterly showcases the aesthetics of the industrial age.
The visualized fragments full of the glamour of the highly-developed industrial age seem to embody the era as a whole where you see the splendour and charm, the standing and moving, the fears and struggles. Being curious and passionate, we still cannot get access to them as it is just a heterogeneous world where machines dominate, and where we perceive the inadequacy and sentiments of the era while we enjoy its excellence. Enrico Bach’s paintings serve as an affectionate melody unique to the times, at the meantime, it is his paintings that keep the euphoric chant hidden in the distinctively poetic, polished narratives of the era.
“Shortly before falling asleep, the world we perceive still throws slender shadows at the edge of our drifting consciousness. Then the images break, slide over and into each other, and splinter like logic. We are at the mercy of our dreams, their meandering, and our deepest self — and from the very beginning we are accustomed to this. It is an almost everyday borderline experience into which we glide easily and relaxed”. Describing her appreciation of Enrico Bach’s works in such poetic language, Kirsten Voigt has acutely perceived the intensity of poetics that Enrico Bach’s paintings intimate.
31 October 2019
