Le Sirenuse I–XX

Caroline Bachmann lives in the Swiss village of Cully, on the shores of Lake Geneva, where a core element of her practice is the observation of this watery landscape under the ever-changing influence of light, wind, waves and weather. At Le Sirenuse, it was the view of the Li Galli islands from Room 65 that became the artist's focus. The numerous sketches she made in Positano acted as the musical score for a seascape cycle consisting of twenty small oil tondos on canvas that are hung in small niches below the ceiling of the Don't Worry Bar – one of the original living rooms of the Sersale family villa that preceded the hotel.
 
Bachmann hews to the classical categories of painting, from landscape to portraiture and still life, but pushes her practice into an emotional, dreamlike, transcendent realm by layering diverse temporalities into works that embrace the fluid, malleable qualities of oil paint and its openness to the flow of thought, hesitation and pentimento. The twenty seascapes she created for Le Sirenuse are designed, she remarks, “to be read as an infinitely rotating clock”.