The dead Christ, a strong presence
Heinz Häsler, the current director of the Kunsthaus Interlaken, loves drawing and figurative art. He knows the work of Emmanuel Wüthrich which he had already exhibited during the Cantonale in 2015 and chose to present his Dead Christ (after Hans Holbein the Younger), a drawing created especially for the exhibition at the Sainte Chapelle -Cross in Fontenais last summer. If we know the cyanotypes, the life jackets and the great waves of the Jura, some will have been struck by the appearance in his work of such a powerful religious image.
Emmanuel Wüthrich was a teenager when he visited the Basel Kunstmuseum and discovered the painting by Hans Holbein. Faced with the realistic representation of a dead man, a distant image comes back to him, that of his big brother lying in his coffin, a brother he lost at the age of 4. When, decades later, he had to imagine the content of the exhibition for the chapel of Sainte-Croix, the image of Christ stood out. The drawing will be a way of dialoguing with the Christ of Sorrow painted on the keystone of the Jura chapel.
It took three sheets of paper to receive this extended Christ, the size of which was slightly modified in order to correspond to that of the artist, and between 25 and 30 layers of wash to obtain the shadows, the volumes, the gradients of the skin, the folds of the shroud. Although the artist used the basic four-color colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, black), the overall effect tends toward green. A sickly green, symbol of future putrefaction.
-This drawing is therefore a way of celebrating faith, a very intimate way of taming one’s own finitude and a masterful homage to the masters of the Germanic Renaissance.
Cantonale Berne Jura 2024, EAC (les halles), Porrentruy, and Kunsthaus Interlaken until January 26, 2025; Jura Museum of Arts, Moutier, until February 2, 2025.
