JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Kehrer Verlag (here). Softcover, 28×36 cm, 96 pages, with 41 color reproductions. Includes an essay by Christiane Stahl. Design by Hannah Feldmeier. In an edition of 800 copies. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: One of the aspects of an artist’s career that we often don’t unpack carefully enough is the iterative nature of his or her creativity. In many cases, one single serendipitous (or even accidental) inspiration will kick off an entire body of work, which will then catalyze other new ideas and potential improvements that spawn projects of their own, leading to still further flashes of inspiration and evolution that would only have been possible as downstream relatives of the original thought. In this way, a developing chain of artistic thinking gets built and refined, one that we can detect and actually follow if we watch closely.
The abstract paper arrangements that form the basis of the photographs in Jessica Backhaus’s photobook Plein Soleil sit in the middle of exactly this kind of multi-year aesthetic investigation. A few years back, the German photographer had begun experimenting with photographing cut paper tabletop setups, when the warm light of the sun actually forced the thin papers she was using to curl and rise up from the flattened surface, creating unexpected shadows and transparencies. That first tenuous insight ultimately led all the way to her 2021 photobook Cut Outs (reviewed here).
Plein Soleil essentially picks up where that project left off, with several new innovations and adaptations of her deliberately constrained process. Gone are the elegantly curved and ovoid cut papers; Backhaus has moved back to the sharper lines and harder edges of uncut rectangular and square sheets of paper. And instead of the sun activating the scenes and doing the quiet curving, she’s taken control of that process, making the bends, bulges, and flips of the paper herself, rather than letting chance take its course. This change most importantly allows for more complex and exaggerated curvature options, where sheets twist underneath themselves or coil into loose hollows, barrels, and tunnels (a few reminiscent of the curled paper drops of Wolfgang Tillmans), which can then be nested in among other sheets with more compositional complexity. Using spotlights on her “micro-theater stage”, the resulting arrangements are even brighter, more muscular, and more densely energetic than before; in comparison, the earlier “Cut Outs” now look surprisingly pared down and elemental.
Scale turns out to be an important variable in this new series. Most of the “Cut Outs” images were seen top down, from a relatively fixed distance, creating a sense of the thin papers floating on top of the backdrops, with the objects generally isolated in the center of the compositions with some emptiness around the edges. In Plein Soleil, that omniscient vantage point is no longer dominant. Backhaus gets in much closer, often from an angle, creating some sense of foreground and background, or at least spatial depth in the composition. This leads to images that are cropped down much tighter that before, pulling the edges in and creating a more densely crowded area of layered action.
As implied by the photobook’s title Plein Soleil (or full sun in English), the light feels quite a bit brighter in these new compositions, creating darker shadows, more saturated colors, whiter highlights, and more intense color gradations along the areas of transparency and curvature. And similarly, the angle from which the light is cast continues to rotate around, creating shadows that turn in nearly every direction imaginable.
In terms of photobook design and construction, Plein Soleil is different from Cut Outs in nearly every way. At more than fourteen inches high, it’s a tall softcover book, with broad sheets that generally offer one image per spread, on one side or the other flanked by full white space; this scale encourages us to get closer in to the pictures, the bigness of the pages feeling full and enveloping. In several cases, one composition has been laid atop another, filling both sides of the spread from edge to edge, with mismatches of scale creating a picture-in-picture arrangement; in a few of these spreads, the background images in the doubled arrangements have been enlarged to the point that the textures and iridescent shadings of the papers reveal themselves more fully, creating even further contrast with the images laid “on top”.
It’s clear that there has been plenty of artistic evolution in the years between Backhaus’s two projects, with her abstractions becoming more confident, more sophisticated, and more vibrantly playful long the way. Her compositions now have more volume, with interiors and exteriors that intermingle, and shadows that dance across the surfaces with more sinuous sharpness. By intensifying many of the variables, Backhaus has amplified the sense of interplay, taking more risks and generating more surprises. When we trace the linked progression of these two successive projects, it’s obvious that Backhaus is continuing to find new areas of abstraction to iteratively explore, with tantalizing new challenges and opportunities coming with each step forward.
Collector’s POV: Jessica Backhaus is represented by Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin (here) and Robert Klein Gallery in Boston (here), among others. Her work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
Having been impressed enough by the photos here and LK’s words to look further into the world of Backhaus I see she has an extensive back catalogue each with something impressive to offer BUT THIS IS THE BIG ONE.