Le Matin is Caroline Bachmann’s first solo exhibition in France, curated by Claire Hoffmann and Claire Le Restif.

Whether we’re children or adults, we’ve all played the game of finding shapes in the clouds or in the surrounding landscape. This playful activity pushes us towards the momentary abstraction of a concrete form (a cloud, a hill) in order to transform it into another recognizable figure (a castle, a shooting star, a part of the human body). The cloud, hill or mountain thus floats in a perception that is both part of the reality that surrounds us, and part of an inner reality that, while unique to us, can be the object of a shared, even universal experience.

Bachmann’s landscapes by moonlight and at dawn, which she sets in frame-like openings, recall the uniformity of depictions of the region by artists who traveled to Switzerland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her paintings show the flatness of the surface of a lake, the verticality of a mountain, or the forms of clouds and stars at the sky. These simple and subtly peculiar shapes that comprise these loosely symmetrical compositions, however, make Bachmann’s images immediately intriguing.

Exploring figurative painting, Bachmann draws on her conceptual artistic practice as well as her ten-year research into Marcel Duchamp with artist and curator Stefan Banz. Her portraits, still lifes of flowers, and landscapes question the notion of perception, time, and what Bachmann herself calls “recognition”: “rediscovering something one already knows, which dwells within us in a latent sense, just waiting to be reawakened.”

Bachmann’s exhibition at le Crédac extends over all three rooms of the centre. Across two rooms, a selection of landscapes, portraits and still lifes are presented. In the third, largest room, alongside her monumental panorama Le Matin (2022), from which the exhibition takes its name, a number of historic works by the American painter Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864–1941) are presented, as well as drawings by Bachmann that reveal her working practice.

Bachmann discovered Eilshemius’s work during her research into Marcel Duchamp who organised a number of exhibitions by the American landscape painter in the early 20th century – also the frequent painted frames that surround Bachmann’s canvases reference the work of Eilshemius.