Céline Strolz

The house is a space. The home is a place.

I have peeked into so many windows. Into so many kitchens. Into so many gardens.  

It is like flipping through an IKEA catalog. I judge the choice of lighting, the number of books on the shelves or the colour of the walls. I imagine my life in someone else’s home.

And then I visited a house in the countryside. It was once the home of a famous group of artists. Embroidered linen draped into curtains in the bedroom. A set of indigo ceramics in the kitchen. This would make for a well curated diner party. A wooden screen covered in red and green drawings in the reading room. Intimacy for reading, that’s nice. The smell of freshly cut flowers. Is someone still living here? And the wallpaper. Beautifully intense colours shaping hand-drawn patterns on the walls. There was one colour in particular. I had seen it before somewhere. That spring evening when we had dinner all together in my grandmother’s garden? It was making me feel safe and excited at the same time. Now I was obsessed – I despaired to reproduce that unique colour, to bring back the homely memories.

The artist’s home is a tourist destination. Houses that were once intimate and sacred become public. They are museums of fake artefacts – reproductions of originals staging the pretend story of intimacy. This is the tale of art history as spectacle.