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. It is a similar experience when looking at the colour fields in some of Enrico Bach’s paintings.
Something shifts, slides, lurches, breaks, and comes to rest disparately in new configurations. The nice clear order changes over to subtly suggesting imminent chaos which is building up in gentle shifts. Something has become agitated and stays perturbed. Slightly confused, one perceives this, organises with the eyes and in one’s thoughts, rotates, turns, puts back; amused because one by one the colour fields push forward, harry, block, reposition others, spread in width but only minimally in depth. Now and again one feels like pushing them away, lifting them up, turning them on their side, flipping them over, exposing them. Something there is layered, tilted, wedged, barred, or barricaded.
The colour fields contend that almost nothing — that is, only almost nothing — just very little is under and behind them: no three-dimensional body, no deep space, and no stabilising foundations, but perhaps a further surface, a pattern, a film, a grounded structure. But certainly not an abyss with the possibility of falling into it. Everything will be straightened out again, sorted out again. Order may be ephemeral but it can be established. This is the cheerfully optimistic assurance of these paintings, which at the same time make it quite clear that they neither can nor want to be anything more than an almost random, fascinating snippet of something that is far larger, indecipherable, and complex, or perhaps a section of a slender, elegant house of cards world with tissue paper-thin walls. And, obviously, the paintings can be regarded from many different perspectives. The large-format work RSW, for instance, affords 4 × 7 views. One sees tiles and grout, white and many shades of grey. The plate tectonics of the floor or wall covering seen from a top view crunches, seems frosty and sober on the one hand, and on the other as clear as glass. Every glance at it is literally denounced as “skewed”, every section as “dislocated” and “crazy” in joyous anarchy. Structures of tiles and grids build a syncopated rhythm. Bach’s paintings deconstruct their own constructivist posture.
In these structures that are also somewhat unsettling, there almost always exists something that is not conceivable without space and that would not be visible without space. This something appears through cracks, peeps out of one and the same painting in different directions around pretend corners and edges, brings about the brightness or shadows of colour gradients, forms horizons and communicates moods — of rise and fall, of beginning and end.
Morning light, evening light; ceremonial, clear and strong light; flickering light that glances off surfaces with minimal reliefs and makes them shine superbly. And the “sound” of the paintings, which often have a certain clinking, clattering, and also sonority in the deep bass tones of black, becomes metallic. These modern backgrounds of gold and silver are geometrically patterned, hallmarked, brushed, with nothing behind them, and are themselves the object of scrutiny — gold, silver, bronze, aluminium grey. At times a painting exhibits variations of illumination and reflection; at times it suggests that light is an intrinsic part of the colour, emanates from it, seeps out of it. Currently, Enrico Bach only rarely uses light and colour in a Caravaggesque manner — the pronounced chiaroscuro of some of his early paintings rendered them mysterious, looming, and dramatic. In 2013/2014 he produced a series of reenactments of works by Rembrandt (The Night Watch and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp), Velázquez (Portrait of Pope Innocent X.), and Vermeer (The Art of Painting) — transformations of organic forms into geometry. Figurative depictions transition into boxy constructs, slightly metaphysical, abstracted from bodies. These were already hyperreal defamiliarisations. With their casual references to real, everyday things — venetian blinds, tiles, files, folders, architectural elements, walls, tower loudspeakers — Enrico Bach’s current compositions exude a surreal charm for they operate on the borderline between liberty with meaning and allusions to the banal; treading the fine line between a sculpturally plausible painting and painting that joyfully embraces its own self-sufficiency, arranges fields and lines on a flat background until tension between them is created, until there is friction between them, until they are enmeshed in permanent contradictions.
In some cases a frame provides the construction with a little support. However, this too is only a part that remains open and fragmented. These frames do not surround the entire picture, but often only appear on two of the four sides. With the aid of overlapping and light distribution the viewer’s visual experience tends on the one hand in the direction of technoid, clean, and clinical, and on the other remains nonchalant and playful — letters and lettering slide into the picture in a Dadaist manner, not decodable semantics, but rather referencing the fact that alongside the world of visible surfaces, of projectable bodies, the sphere of signs and symbols exists, even when these are only empty typography, surrogates of decoration or ornament, brandings without trademarks, products, and emotions. Some of the paintings were inspired by the contents on the top of a writing desk, on which a collection of papers and patterns (not glued down) meet like in a collage, an assemblage of surfaces and matrices: squared, lined, spreadsheets, letters, and fragments of words; jagged and solid bars that heavily underline something, highlight it, or black it out.
Enrico Bach plays with trompe-l’oeil — and this is not only a harmless act. The way he deceives the eye does not suggest opening up real space into a different sphere. A window with a boundless perspective does not open; instead, when the gaze encounters these compositions it ricochets off and falls back on itself.
Bach’s pictorial inventions draw on a number of achievements in the history of European art. They are heirs to the tradition of still life painting that sought to define art and its epistemology, to both analytical and synthetic Cubism as well as to the Op Art of the 1960s that grew out of Bauhaus geometry. At the same time some of Bach’s works refer back to the colour–light dramaturgy of the early modern era and Dutch Baroque art, while others reference the trompe-l’oeil still life paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly the mischievous art quodlibets, which assembled writings, letters, notes, and objects from middle-class writing rooms into cryptic portraits of their owners, into small cabinets of evocative memorabilia or portraits of friends and family. Enrico Bach’s quodlibets cannot be read as a rebus can. His works do not tell stories, but present details and sections of instrumentaria — folders, indexes, grids — which can be used to produce order and structure, the media of an epoch that generates and manages data. Once upon a time trompe-l’oeil not only demonstrated the mastery of the artist as a worthy successor to Zeuxis, but also told us that we should not trust our senses and sensory impressions implicitly because they can be deceived and seduced, are easily thrown off balance.
Enrico Bach multiplies the illusion through simplifying the form and at the same time unmasks it. In a calculated and well-ordered way, but not worked out from the beginning, these paintings thematise discontinuity without drama. Nevertheless, one cannot help but think that they also reflect on contemporary phenomena: our interaction with more and more surfaces, superficiality, and changing sets and backdrops — even if it’s only on the surface.
