Extract from curator Veronica Cuomo’art essay about “THROUGH THE OPACITY OF MEMORY” series from J H-Botquelen PRIMEVAL 1 theme.
Botquelen is solidly established in the local Swiss German market and widely celebrated in Europe and the U.S., where her work is included in the collection at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. The artist has used different techniques and mediums over time. Mainly self-taught, she started experimenting with molten glass in 2001 after working with ceramics for decades. Glass is thousands of years old, but Botquelen's experiments have laid open its unexpected mutant temperament in her sculptures and murals. By its nature, glass has always invited alchemy, hybridization, and different substances' infusions to achieve multiple personalities. Jacqueline H-Botquelen (JHB) operates through her art as an archaeologist of the human psyche. Opposite to polished, brand-new objects, her creations appear like excavated or recovered from some distant sites in the artist's unconscious. Each artwork had already lived a life that has modified its structure, leaving it with a story to tell. These objects are more brought back to life than they are freshly created. Using molten glass, Botquelen achieves an uncanny overtime effect as memory's remnants of humanity itself.
In I can feel my heartbeat I-V, from the same series, executed with a dark watercolors palette on self-made paper on canvas, the artist stage ageless faces falling silent their stories, trapped into the dense space they inhabit. Dark-eyed, the characters are engulfed in a secluded world. They are distant, and the paper's veiled effect accentuates their inaccessibility. The lost innocence of these once little girls is oppressive. Dead birds camouflaged into the composition remind the spectator of the precarity of human existence. The occupation of the pictorial space carries along in its somber atmosphere an instant of latency before the devastation. The imagery it refers to is comprised of enigmas and shadows. Botquelen reclaims the right to her phantoms with overwhelming intensity, capturing in the bi- dimensionality of the painting a moment of infinity.
Like the French philosopher and art critic, Louis Marin proposed in 1989, the storia occurs in modern representation, from the articulation between reflexive opacity and transitive transparency. JHB oscillates effortlessly between them with graceful proficiency. In a pilgrimage through the opacity of memory, these mysterious fragments of consciousness become metaphors of the path Botquelen follows; it is a search for the ultimate essence of her art, materialized in the sophisticated manipulation of millenarian materials in a desperate attempt to resist fading into oblivion.

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