Catherine Kirchhoff is born in 1962 in Geneva where she lives and works

training

1998 : Certificat d’Aptitude à l’Enseignement Secondaire I et II en Arts Visuels

1995 : Diplôme de l’Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel, Genève

1991 : Parson School of New York, USA

1987-88 : University of California, Los Angeles, USA

1985 : Diplôme de l’EEPS, Université de Genève

1981 : Maturité artistique, Collège Claparède, Genève

1980 : Secondary school honor graduation diploma, Toronto, Canada

ARTISTIC APPROACH

by Diane Daval Béran
translated by Marie-Hélène Hancock

This is appetizing painting, full of richly coloured flavours. Whichever way you turn, shapes cascade around the canvas, diagonally, spilling over its edge to come yet closer to us, grabbing our eyes’ attention. Sometimes the animation quietens down – a freeze frame reveals itself as a close-up.The lull is suddenly illuminated by a flash of recognition.We had been led astray at first by the strength of the colours, but we can now perceive familiar images. For the object of the painting only yields up its secrets slowly, and even then will never impose itself on us.

Yes, those are bananas – yes, that’s an orange. And over there, within the close-knit strokes, we can unravel sweets or appetizers – with greater or lesser ease. All of this can be eaten, yet it is not physical hunger which is awakened. Greediness is of a different order here. But as subjects linked to food are a part of everyone’s day-to-day life, the effect of the painting is here made even more manifest. It would in fact be more correct to speak of patterns, of “motifs” rather than of subjects, for right from her first life modelling work, it was not objects themselves, with their whole chain of iconographical meanings, which caught Catherine Kirchhoff’s interest, but rather the shapes which compose them. She plays with the plastics of objects, making them lose all obviousness. Only the physical characteristics of the painting, the bold colours and the sharp forms, are willingly, clearly defined. For the rest, suggestion takes over certitude. Let the spectator make of it what he or she wills.

After drawing nudes, objects, then arrangements of objects, Catherine Kirchhoff naturally turned to advertising, a world which has always fascinated her in all its aspects. Packaging and advertising graphics now form the structure of her painting, emphasizing the effect of the distance taken towards the final subject. The titles of her painting appear as anodine as the images which underly it, simply incorporating a reminder of the visual ingredient, adding a touch of humour and a toothsome bite.

Her choices are made on impulse : once a reproduction inspires her, she sticks closely to its two- dimensional forms, which must be supple, varied and irregular, carefully following the outlines of the model in her drawing. But once colour is applied, her freedom runs riot.There are no rules here, and in particular no descriptive function.The sharp, contrasted chromatics of her painting, defined subjectively, depend only on the relationships between the tones, according to the surfaces which they animate.

The act of painting itself, the physical contact with the canvas, pleases her enormously, and she consciously retains the liberty to modify certain forms or colours during the progress of the work. As she is satisfied only when the colours she has chosen are completely saturated, several layers need to be applied.After briefly working in charcoal, she has come to adopt acrylic, a medium which offers her the smooth and opaque colours which she seeks and the possibility of sharply defined limits between surfaces.

This technique is also particularly well suited to the large formats for which Catherine Kirchhoff shows a preference. By opting for outsize canvases, the artist completely immerges the viewer in the picture, implicating him or her in the partisanship of her viewpoints. From the very outset, she has isolated details of bodies or of objects, blowing them up to the extent that they become identifiable only with difficulty. From fragmentary elements centred on the canvas, she has now evolved towards the fragmentation of the pictural surface by the proliferation of a design repeated on the entire canvas and yet further Further, for as the centre bursts out, the limits of the canvas can no longer contain the plastic events, which swarm and spill over. It is “all over”, a space opening up onto the exterior, a consequence of the intense interior animation.

Off centre and beyond frame, the painting abandons all the ingredients of figurative representation : no chiaroscuro, no perspective. Shadows exist only as a pretext for colour and perspective is no longer even a memory. Surfaces are flat, space is planar. Breadth replaces depth. Figures become background, as background takes on its own body.

Of the reality of the subjects, only the logic of their formal organisation is left.The aim is not to copy, but to understand shapes. Moreover, the changes in scale and the total independence of colour bring the work yet further from a reality which already is no more, since the object which serves as a stamp does not come directly from reality but from advertising, whose reason for being is not to bear witness or to contemplate, but to be efficient. Image of an image which is already itself reflected, an image squared in fact, this painting plays with shapes and colours by peeling off their varnish of familiarity and transforming them into an interrogative presence, by the shift between that which is habitual and that which is unaccustomed.

To unleash vision and rediscover once more what it relishes, and to devour with gusto, yet with our eyes only…