Vertige

Text in English, Italian & German. Whereas the mountains in Swiss art have always occupied a central position in national iconography and, in their powerfulness and unalterability, have been regarded as a constantly recurring symbol of the original Helvetian character, they have recently figured increasingly as a metaphoric territory in which the contradictions in the behaviour of post industrial man towards nature and the landscape are shown in a particularly conspicuous and suspense-filled fashion. In his "Snow Management" photographs, Jules Spinatsch has created an impressive document of the post-modern development of the Alps into a leisure theme park, In precisely illuminated and some-what eerie scenes. he has given a visible form to the alienation of man and the artificiality, of his con-sumption of nature. Prototypical of the "mountain entertainment industry', his work contains shad-owy images that in their alienation and absurdity, express the complex and bizarre relationship of urban man with the mountains. Cecile Wick, on the other hand, took a different course, tracing the remains of sublimity and mystery that the mountains have retained as a myth robbed of its magic in monochrome, black-and-white or delicately tinted light-dark images. She seeks deserted landscapes, unspoilt nature that appears to have resisted the interventions of civilisation, although they have long since been more of a memory than a wilderness. Her occasional use of 'primitive" techniques and blurring, as well as of classical image composition express the remembered character of the landscape, at the same creating a vivid poetry arid beauty that the medium had almost lost. The combination of pathos and absurdity, a longing for nature and remoteness from reality, is the basis of Nicolas Faure's ironic visual criticism. In his photo essay, taken over several decades, he shows the average mountain enthusiast" as a neon visual disturbance in the mountain panorama. In his recent group of works, entitled "Les jeux sont faits", on the other hand, he seeks the scene of his childhood memories in the landscape. With himself as an adult in the woods of his childhood, Nicolas Faure reviews his inner images in the light of their relevance to the present in a sometimes melancholy, sometimes mischievous fashion, and tries to bring his longing in line with reality. No one in recent times has created a more, convincing document of the touching uselessness of "back to nature" with-out falling into a simplistic visual thinking.