Isabelle Mühlbacher - Traces from the Past.
By means of the most diverse media, Isabelle Mühlbacher defends the position of the humane where it already is a relic, a trace, a reminder. An artist-portrait by CastYourArt.
Against the dematerialization of art and the negation of the body, Isabelle Muehlbacher raises the claim to assert the space and the body as the location of designation. Her works are inner mindsets, dispositions substantiating into forms, on the foundation of the conceptual history of painting and object configuration. The works surprise and delineate the profile of an art that is challenging in its aesthetic positions, and keeps revolving around essential subjects.
Isabelle Muehlbachers work transcends the representing surface of the image – even if using it on occasions –in order to involve the surrounding space in its totality; the possibilities of an image or an object that is suggestive instead of depicting are manifold; they prompt the viewer to engage with the personal universe of the artist.
Insights are provided by effect of synaesthesia and the amalgam of stimuli constituting that totality of generated realities, from ideas and concepts to the attempt of capturing the essence of a thing or situation.
The creation at hand does no more appear as an object reproducing the actual order of things by means of a mouldable material, the placement within the spatial context diffuses the notion of an objectifiable reality. The concept of representation, of reproducing a real or imagined order gives way to the idea as such, and conveying it is the intention of Isabelle Muehlbacher.
In her works she creates an impression of continuous movement, a dynamism that highlights the uncompleted, she never shows the last and final status – because it does not exist: being is movement or it does not exist, hence this peculiar emphasis on the becoming. This movement takes us to a universe of sensuality, sublimated by the eroticism emanating from her work.
Her oeuvre puts a big question mark on our civilization, which in her case does not entail a shift away from it or even a turn towards the mythological. Quite the contrary, she seems to absorb the hermeneutic function of perception and human consciousness, in order to update the content of the mythological and join it with the contemporary mindset.
Within her work and as part of her approach, we observe a shifted sense of an ambivalent nature leading us to transcend the limited aesthetic stereotypes in order to find a virtually linguistic comprehension, by making a virtually linguistic effort. This effort enables us ultimately to assign a sense and value to her work.
Far from frivolous sensuality or opportunistic appropriation of current imagery, she focuses on dark, unfamiliar and insecure mental areas. In the end these areas are nothing but the place of creation, where the imaginary is transformed into pictorial objects.
The image is the only device that is able to occupy and fill up the void, because essentially it is the imperative of existence conferring its worthiness to it. The latter, the imperative to exist, is a correlative of the former, the image, and leads to the insight that every reproduction necessarily constitutes an alienation, a displacement of what wishes to return to life to perpetuate its presence. The rest that remains after the end of the gaze is the mirror that reflects, even in absentia, the alienation of the self.
Isabelle Muehlbacher shows us her obsessions and at the same time, that being faithful to these obsessions is the meaning of being an artist. (Text: Cem Angeli)
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