A River in the Trees: Hannes Schüpbach’s ‘L’Atelier’
A positive created from a negative, Hannes Schüpbach’s L’Atelier (2007) is the portrait of a space drawn by that which is outside itself. In place of description, poetics; in place of space, time.[1] And projected back into that other, darker space of the cinema with a single lit window, the dialectics of interior and exterior are doubled back on one another, and the viewer at once inhabits screening room, atelier and the air beyond its casement.
Filmed at a Paris studio that Schüpbach occupied for two months in the spring of 2006, L’Atelier is the sum of the artist’s time spent there. Though we see little of the apartment, it is the subject, and the means by which the film is created in the first place – both in a mechanical, physical sense, and in terms of its status as temporary home. In a similar way, the artist’s staring-out becomes a homage of sorts – or at least a mute reference to – his staying-in, as everything without is moderated by the frame on the world that the room offers. The exterior, the view from its window, becomes the interior of the artist’s perspective, and in turn furnishes the atelier from without.
‘Sometimes, it is in being outside itself that being tests consistencies’, wrote Gaston Bachelard.[2] To venture beyond is to be able to look within. In L’Atelier, this maxim is reflected on three distinct planes: those of the artist’s separation from his usual centre of gravity, producing work away from home; the gaze of the artist, approximated by the mechanism of the camera, describing an interior from without; and the presence of the film itself in the space of reception, existing outside of, in spite of, but because of, the studio – the space we never quite see, but that governs that which we do.
An atelier is a studio, a workshop, a place of work. It is also sometimes, as it is here, a place of residence, but reverses the usual hierarchy, which would see a room for work at home as secondary to the house’s main function of shelter. An atelier is a workshop first. The business of living is subordinate to that of making, or perhaps even an equivalence is established between the two. And here it is also temporary: not a residence, but a place of residency; an interval between poles of permanence; this foreign city a vessel to house a portion of a life and bear the fruit of a new work. It offers a retreat, a removal, a sense of otherness.
Familiarity might breed contempt, but first it begets blindness: the function of removing oneself from one’s quotidian environment is to clear the scales from one’s eyes, whether that journey is actual or imagined, as Elizabeth Bishop wonders playfully in Questions of Travel:
Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?[3]
Ironically, though Schüpbach has travelled to make L’Atelier, the form of its making revolves around exactly the quiet sitting that Pascal propounded.[4] Crucially, this period of residency grants a time of difference between other, more permanent forms of being resident, in which both life and work, we are to assume, are somewhat heightened, concentrated by the perimeter imposed by time. Here, the artist is a temporary occupant engaged in an activity that is itself proscribed by the temporal. As time runs out in the residency, so time accrues in the inscribed film in camera: the light is poured gradually from camera lucida to camera obscura.
The otherness of this place activates it: its potential to make new work possible because – though it may closely resemble the domestic space the traveller has just left – it has none of the ties of that space. The domestic chores that must be performed can yet be carried out with none of the sense of duty, the contract between self and space, of the home. It is a representation of the, or a, home, but stops short of becoming one: long-term, this could never be sustained, nor would it be desirous, but in the short term its indeterminacy is useful for the resident, here to make work, purposefully unrooted.
It is this reflexivity that is interesting in L’Atelier: the atelier itself is at once the means by which the work is made, and its subject. Projected back into the cinema, the space of reception, it lives once again and somehow inhabits – is resident – there, with the same (albeit radically compressed) air of the temporary. This, as W.S. Graham suggested, is the place where the temporal and the atemporal meet; a place of stasis which yet contains movement, and vice versa:
So this is the place. This
Is the place fastened still with movement,
Movement as calligraphic and formal as
A music burned on copper.[5]
There is much in Graham’s words to commend them to the dualism at play in L’Atelier, and not only that of the relationship between time and times. There is a taut circularity at the core of the film: the status of the space we see on screen is the selfsame space that has made it possible for us to see it in the first place. There is the sense that the artist confines himself, as if an anchorite, to this room in which stillness, ironically, becomes the means by which the movement outside is allowed to unfold, and is recorded doing so, undisturbed. Here, there is no need of the perspective that the world beyond the window’s angle of view would seem to offer, for the room itself, transformed into the universe, assumes the dimensionless breadth of abstraction. For the account of this space to be true, it must be, as Marianne Moore required, ‘lit with piercing glances into the life of things’.[6] Though piercing, it is the glance here that is crucial: it would be a fallacy to expect that revelation depends on measured objectivity and, here, a straightforward document of a space. This is a place of experience before knowledge, and it makes perfect sense, emotionally and poetically if not literally, for the viewer to know it solely by looking outside of it. ‘A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometric space,’ Bachelard asserted.[7]
As Graham wrote, the room in which work is made is now no longer bound by walls, but becomes a space of potential:
And as the lamp burned back the silence
And the walls caved to a clear lens,
The room again became my distance [8]
Sometimes a necessary distance can be wrested from the most unlikely of quarters. And Graham’s lens and lamp are apposite, of course: the ingredients, here, for the space of making and for that of reception.
In a curious inversion, as the atelier space sheds any sense of confinement, so the outside world assumes it: a fixed view, framed and subdivided, staring at a flattened without from a within that is boundless. It places the world at a remove, and the artist – and the viewer – at an edge, as J.H. Prynne would have it:
That’s
the human city, & we are
now at the edge of it. Which way
are we facing.[9]
Which way are we facing, indeed? In or out? Are the windows opening or closing, and which world – interior or exterior – is here the weightier? Schüpbach’s atelier is a portal of a sort. We hover throughout at its threshold, by open windows, never retreating fully into the room itself nor venturing outside, save the arm’s-length digressions – kept at a formal remove – the artist makes into the moonlight-blue of a formal garden.
The division, the point of divergence, is at the windows, needless to say. While it is facile to observe that they separate within from without – that they are an opening – this becomes complicated by the fact that they are also a surface, the glass of their panes by turns transparent and reflective. A window or a mirror? Following the inversion further, is the representation of ‘outside’ that which appears to be beyond the windows, or that which is reflected in them?
It is the poesis of Schüpbach’s approach, and its conscious alterity, when compared to a moving image that is strictly representational, that makes this possible. ‘And language bears within itself the dialectics of open and closed’, Bachelard wrote, ‘Through meaning it encloses, while through poetic expression, it opens up.’[10] Indeed, he set great store on doors, and therefore windows, as binary potentiates: open versus closed, possibility versus impossibility. While to invite an oppositional reading here – pitting impressionism against realism – would be crass, it nevertheless remains that the play of interior and exterior is only possible because of a loosening of the moving image as a functional resource, and an implicit understanding of its poetics.
*
Common to Schüpbach’s other films, L’Atelier follows a metrical, serial structure, composed of sections in counterpoint to one another. The cadence is not a means to an end, an ornament to bridge contrasts, but an end in itself; a dynamic threshold between stasis and movement, the vivid and the pale, or as Gertrude Stein had it, a shift that elevates a dynamism to the film’s palette which, were it not silent, might otherwise be described in terms of an audible tonality. Here all is ‘Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color.’[11] The film ends with frenzied movement, the frame ever larger and more intrusive, the colours of the trees ever darker and deeper as the camera is stopped down.
The field of view from the window is of neighbouring tenements, trees and sky. Bishop’s ‘Two Mornings and Two Evenings: Paris, 7 A.M.’, describes a similar milieu and perspective – an entreaty to look down, and to look out as a means to better perceive the within:
Look down into the courtyard. All the houses
Are built this way, with ornamental urns
Set on the mansard roof-tops where the pigeons
Take their walks. It is like introspection
To stare inside, or retrospection,
A star inside a rectangle, a recollection [12]
While it suggests that the viewer’s gaze does not stop at looking onto the courtyard, as Schüpbach’s does, but travels on, into, past the panes of the neighbouring buildings to peer inside, the poem’s conclusion is remarkably congruent. Where Bishop offers that it is ‘like introspection / To stare inside’, in L’Atelier, the same is true where it stops in the space between buildings: it is in gazing out that a sense of interiority is established.
*
A window is an opening, but it is also a frame. A frame offers a structure by which to organise, but it is also a snare. Open, the window reveals only what it allows: traps the view, orders it, holds it to ransom. The window, the wind eye, or opening for light,[13] is an ‘opening for light’, an aperture, a matte box set into the camera of the atelier which here doubles for that darker chamber of the camera itself.[14]
More than this, though, the window offers the lure of the particular: a view requisitioned, mediated, performed upon the viewer. The English landscape architects, Charles Bridgeman, Capability Brown and Humphry Repton among them, wrestled great swaths of countryside into vistas to be enjoyed from particular vantage points in the stately houses that commanded them, shaping the still-novel idea of ‘landscape’; a view to be viewed. The window becomes a container for a particular perspective, a promise of the, or a, picturesque, as much as an opening for light.
The artist’s portion of the year changes gradually, the white light and barely-clothed trees of early spring giving way to richer greens and blues, high cumulus clouds piled up in the sky. At points, the verdant scene framed by the window is interrupted as from elsewhere – from the mind’s eye – by a mordant blue cast, the frame of panes made flat, graphic, black on blue, the frame a snare; and now orange: a glass vase. And later, a red filter sets the candles on a horse chestnut ablaze.[15] Then blue again, and the box hedges of a jardin anglais, a garden constructed with a view in mind; the blue of Arthur Rimbaud’s Novel:
– Over there, framed by a branch
You can see a little patch of dark blue
Stung by a sinister star that fades
With faint quiverings, so small and white … [16]
Here is nature within the city: the trees’ organic forms and movement marshalled and entrapped by the rational geometry of the frames of window – sometimes subdividing the view completely with a dramatic black cross, like Dürer’s draughtsman’s net – and film. The movement of the camera mocks that of the trees’ occasionally violent swaying outside the window.
Beyond the snare of the frame, here is the entombment of the vitrine, the surface of the glass panes, which are at points a visible reminder of the space between. And so a third space asserts itself, the plane of the pane, not quite two-dimensional, not quite three, moderating the interaction of exterior and interior, until at one point we see a broken pane, fixed with tape, a chaotic network of sealed cracks disrupting its rectilinear logic – and at the same time somehow lending an equivalence to the trees beyond.
Then the windows are open: one pane remains a window, the other becomes a mirror, reflecting a crosswise view of the trees outside in the inky chiaroscuro of a glass slide. British poet Elisabeth Bletsoe’s ‘The Solitary One’ summons this shift in which the artificial equilibrium is undone:
day and night commingled:
a moment of balance
and impending change
sways the magic mirror [17]
Though rather less explicitly than the black intervals of Schüpbach’s Verso, the interstice asserts itself, and in doing so disturbs not only the neat binary of inside and out, but, as Bletsoe summons, night and day too. So, also, the gradual turning-outward of the casements echoes the effect of the variable shutter in Schüpbach’s camera, recalling the person whose hand appears spectrally to manipulate the window, occupying this space behind the window, which we hardly see.
‘Ecstasy affords / the occasion and expediency determines the form’, wrote Marianne Moore.[18] Poetry – more properly, a sense of poetics – provides a fuller understanding of the dialectics at play here, simultaneously more economical and richer than any literal account could hope to deliver. Witness Seamus Heaney’s stunning equivalence in the briefest of poems, ‘For Bernard and Jane McCabe’:
The riverbed, dried-up, half full of leaves.
Us, listening to a river in the trees. [19]
The observation here relates directly to the sense of the artist-as-viewer looking out while inhabiting within, transposing inside for out, outside for in. Direct sensation is here denied, yet reappears in a different guise: the trees, the wind, the houses, the sky remain beyond the frame of the window; doubly so by the illusion of real space presented by the phenomenon of film itself – and indeed the absence of sound. But, but: we hear the wind in the trees, we experience them tangibly, though in an entirely different mode. One experience is transposed into another: valences shift; windows become portals, become mirrors, become screens. As with Schüpbach’s other work, its silence is deafening. ‘Finely, brush the / sound from your / eyes’, commands Prynne: a taut and urgent invocation which here serves as both instruction and description. To enter this atelier, as a viewer, this is what one must do; to enter this atelier, this is what is done.[20]
[1] In The Poetics of Space (La poétique de l’espace, 1957; trans. Maria Jolas, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 13, Gaston Bachelard writes that ‘the real houses of memory … do not readily lend themselves to description’. Our memories, on looking through this window, are as important a factor in the interpretation of the space as any description of it might be.
[2] Gaston Bachelard, ibid., p. 215.
[3] Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Questions of Travel’, in Questions of Travel, 1965; The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), p. 94.
[4] Renaissance French polymath Blaise Pascal wrote that ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ (in Pensées: ‘Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.’ Œuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Chevalier, Paris: Gallimard, 1995, pp. 1138–39).
[5] W.S. Graham, ‘The Nightfishing’, 1955, in Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 23.
[6] Marianne Moore, ‘When I Buy Pictures’, in Selected Poems, 1935; Complete Poems (New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 48.
[7] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 47.
[8] W.S. Graham, Selected Poems, p. 25.
[9] J.H. Prynne, ʻBronze: Fishʼ, in The White Stones, 1969 (New York: New York Review Books, 2016, p. 27).
[10] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 222.
[11] Gertrude Stein, ‘Rooms’, in Tender Buttons, 1914; Tender Buttons, The Corrected Centennial Edition (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2014), p. 70.
[12] Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Two Mornings and Two Evenings: Paris, 7 A.M.’, 1937, in Questions of Travel, p. 26.
[13] The more pedestrian etymology of ‘an opening for light’ is still evident in the French fenêtre and German Fenster, from the Latin fenestra. The Old Norse which supplies the English ‘window’ is arguably more poetic!
[14] This is a resonance that Schüpbach pre-empted with his introduction to New York Film (for students of architecture in Winterthur, 1995; unpublished typescript): ‘You are sitting in a room. Soon it will become dark. So you will sit in a dark room and look into the light, at the image in front of you, out into the film as through a window.’ The difference is that here, that experience is doubled, as the subject of the film is itself a room with a window, so subject and object are conflated.
[15] In the Parc de Sceaux, south of Paris.
[16] Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Novel’, in Complete Works, Selected Letters (trans. Wallace Fowlie, University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 41. ‘– Voilà qu’on aperçoit un tout petit chiffon / D’azur sombre, encadré d’une petite branche, / Piqué d’une mauvaise étoile, qui se fond / Avec de doux frissons, petite et toute blanche…’, ‘Roman’, 1870.
[17] Elisabeth Bletsoe, ‘The Solitary One’, in Pharmacopoeia & Early Selected Works (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010), p. 16.
[18] Marianne Moore, ‘The Past is the Present’, in Complete Poems, p. 88.
[19] Seamus Heaney, ‘For Bernard and Jane McCabe’, 1987, in New Selected Poems 1966–1987 (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 210.
[20] J.H. Prynne, ‘On the Anvil’, in The White Stones, p. 8.
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This essay was written in 2017 and published in 2026 in Hannes Schüpbach: Gestures (Verlag für moderne Kunst, ISBN 978-3-99153-220-0