Edith Ambühl is an artist who fits various disciplines - drawing, painting, tapestry and monotypes – in one project. The generic title Allmend, which can be loosely translated from the German as "common space", gets the sense of communitary ownership in what the artist puts in her work. In addition, what can be seen in her works is much more the registering of a process than a simple pictorical exercise.
For example, in painting by this artist, to a first inattentive glance the essence contained in each canvas will pass unnoticed. It will only be possible to understand it if the viewer's attention is in some way, close to the patience with which the artist made the work - painted, sanded, drawn - again and again. It is a work built from the inside out, in terms of both the artist and her own work, which will be revealed in the transparency of the successive layers. "40 layers on each canvas" statess the artist in the introductory text of this series, but the number pales before the fundamental of the outcome. The act of painting becomes a ritual process of orderly repetition, like a prayer repeated to exhaustion, until leading to a kind of hypnotic phenomenon or a trance state. An exorcism against chaos being an internal or personnel, or one that is of the contemporary life common to all.
The artist finds herself in this succession of layers of geometry and order, where regular rhythms, simple and quiet, are made contemplative by the subtle nuances of color and the conduct of the paintbrush, these rhythms are pulsations that depart naturally from the inside. They are primary rhythms, like the beating of the heart or the inhalingand and the exhaling, that on the canvas act as anti-rhythms, against the noise, the anxiety, the agitation and the destructive. All this powered to the extreme, in subtlety, in the monotypes on rice paper series.
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