What happens when light becomes more than illumination—when it transforms into the principal architect of an image? In her radiant and introspective series Plein Soleil, German visual artist Jessica Backhaus redefines the conceptual boundaries of visual art. Known for her refined sense of intuition and emotional depth, Backhaus shifts from narrative-driven methods into an abstract realm where the composition arises from sunlight, colored paper, and the subtle choreography of shadows.
Abandoning traditional subjects and concrete representation, she constructs fleeting environments where light becomes a sculptor, and color breathes as though alive. Each work is a visual reverie, a lyrical exploration of fragility and form—photographic images that transcend their medium and border on the painterly, even the architectural.
But how does one photograph what is inherently intangible—how does one render light, sensation, or silence itself?
Jessica Backhaus doesn’t seek moments to capture; she crafts them. Through a seemingly humble setup involving folded paper and sunlight, she cultivates compositions of stunning immediacy and chromatic clarity. Her images shimmer with elegance and tension, each a study in contrast, rhythm, and ephemeral beauty. Her process is less observational and more ceremonial—light is not merely used but revered. This meditative approach has positioned her among the most distinct and poetic voices within the contemporary abstract visual arts landscape.
Not every image is designed to reflect reality—some exist to awaken our awareness of it.
Embracing Intuition: A Decade-Long Transition into Abstraction
Jessica Backhaus' shift into abstraction was never born from a singular decision—it was the result of a quiet, accumulative longing that gathered over time. It was not a dramatic rupture, but rather a subtle metamorphosis, driven by her desire to distill complexity into clarity. Over the past ten years, this evolution became increasingly pronounced, each new project drawing her further into the atmospheric and expressive language of form, color, and light. For Backhaus, abstraction has become less a stylistic choice and more a personal terrain—an interior landscape where she could finally explore without boundaries.
What drew her toward abstraction was not the rejection of realism, but an internal calling to discover a different mode of expression, one that would allow her to articulate emotion without dependence on the external world. In this space, memory, intuition, and perception can operate freely, creating visual compositions that invite interpretation rather than insist on meaning. She found in abstraction a generous and malleable medium, one capable of holding ambiguity and emotional nuance without explanation.
Her fascination with this realm grew gradually. Earlier works leaned into observation, capturing people and places with a lyrical sensibility. Yet, beneath the figurative surface, a quieter desire was forming—one that favored reduction over narrative, and atmosphere over representation. She sought to explore how much could be communicated when the visual elements were stripped down to their essential characteristics. Her affinity for silence, stillness, and mood began to supersede her interest in conventional structure.
The Turning Point: From Narrative Image to Visual Essence
A pivotal inflection in her creative journey came with the release of A Trilogy, a series that marked the beginning of her distinct movement away from the representational and into the abstract. In these works, Backhaus began to pare down her visual vocabulary. Color was no longer just a compositional tool—it became a protagonist. Gesture and shape took on new meaning, no longer referencing any recognizable object, but rather operating as emotional triggers. With this work, she stepped into a space where the viewer’s interaction with the image was no longer guided by a defined story but by sensation and inner dialogue.
A Trilogy was not a conclusion but an invitation—an entry point into the deeper world she would fully embrace in her next project. That project was Cut Outs, a collection that marked a profound departure from anything she had created before. Here, Backhaus immersed herself in a tactile study of material and light. She began experimenting with the sculptural properties of paper—folding, cutting, layering. These physical gestures became a way of thinking, of understanding the relationship between surface and depth, hue and shadow, stasis and movement. Each piece in Cut Outs was like a visual sonnet: compact, intense, and rhythmically alive.
The process behind Cut Outs was as methodical as it was instinctive. She carefully curated the interaction between natural light and her hand-shaped materials, waiting for those elusive moments when the sun would cast just the right angle, creating transient forms that flickered with intensity. Her camera served not as a recorder, but as an extension of her eye—capturing fleeting alignments that could never be recreated. The fragility of these compositions was part of their allure; they existed only briefly before the light shifted or the paper moved. This temporal quality gave the work a heightened sense of presence.
A Period of Pause: Rediscovering Rhythm Through Stillness
Following the success and intensity of Cut Outs, Backhaus sensed the need to withdraw momentarily from this rigorous abstraction. The creative act, for her, is cyclical—requiring both contraction and expansion. Rather than pushing forward immediately, she allowed herself to reflect, to breathe, and to reconnect with the fundamental impulses that guide her work. During this interlude, she initiated a new, more meditative project titled The Nature of Things. This body of work offered a quieter rhythm, less concerned with visual experimentation and more focused on subtle observation. It served as a creative cleansing, a space to rest and recalibrate before the next evolution could emerge.
In this period of intentional slowness, Backhaus found space to listen to her inner voice once again. She rekindled her relationship with stillness and simplicity—qualities that had always been present in her art, but now took on a deeper resonance. Instead of attempting to craft her next visual chapter, she allowed it to arrive naturally. She spent more time contemplating light, observing how it interacted with everyday materials, how it moved across walls, objects, and surfaces. This return to observational wonder laid the groundwork for what would become her next major project—Plein Soleil.
The Emergence of Plein Soleil: A Return to Essence
Plein Soleil did not arrive with fanfare. It came quietly, almost unannounced, like light spilling through an open window. It was not the result of strategic planning, but of accumulated longing—a yearning for vivid color, for open space, for working in harmony with natural light. This project is a culmination of years of artistic distillation, where everything extraneous has been set aside in favor of purity. The materials are simple—paper, sunlight, and time—yet the results are transcendent.
In Plein Soleil, the aesthetic becomes elemental. Each image is a unique interaction between sunlight and form, captured in that elusive moment when composition, texture, and shadow achieve perfect balance. There is a palpable serenity in these works, yet also an undercurrent of tension, as if each piece is holding its breath. They are neither static nor decorative; they are meditations in light and space, shaped by instinct and orchestrated by chance.
What sets Plein Soleil apart is its deep emotional resonance. Though abstract, the work feels intimate—like glimpses into the artist’s interior landscape. The use of color is evocative, often tender, occasionally bold. The folds and curves of paper suggest not just physical movement, but emotional vulnerability. The sunlight—her co-author—infuses each piece with warmth, clarity, and vitality.
Backhaus' relocation to the South of France during the making of this series was both practical and poetic. Berlin’s winters offered insufficient light for her vision to unfold, and so she followed the sun—literally and metaphorically. The Mediterranean light, generous and golden, became the perfect collaborator. In this sun-drenched environment, she was able to fully realize her ideas, giving birth to a series that feels not only resolved, but revelatory.
In Plein Soleil, Jessica Backhaus has arrived at a point where form and feeling converge. The project is not merely a continuation of her journey into abstraction—it is its apogee. It synthesizes her years of inquiry, her dedication to nuance, and her deep reverence for light as a living entity. Through it all, she invites us to pause, to observe, and to rediscover the magic in the most elemental gestures. It is in this surrender to simplicity, and in her unwavering trust in intuition, that the quiet power of her work truly resides.
From Literal to Lyrical: A Gentle Drift Away from Realism
Jessica Backhaus’ artistic evolution has been a quiet and contemplative journey—an inward voyage that led her from the descriptive world of realism into the luminous, suggestive territory of abstraction. While her earlier works held roots in observation and the tangible world, they also hinted at a growing disinterest in literal translation. This shift was not abrupt but instead marked by a gradual loosening of structure, an increased sensitivity to atmosphere, and an ever-deepening desire to evoke rather than explain. Her exploration in Six Degrees of Freedom is emblematic of this initial metamorphosis, serving as a threshold between two artistic worlds—one that captures what is seen, and one that renders what is felt.
The very title Six Degrees of Freedom signifies a conceptual opening. It hints at multidimensionality, at unanchored possibility, and at an awareness of the invisible forces that govern movement and perception. These works—though still anchored in forms that could be named—began to question the necessity of representation itself. Space opened up. Shapes lost their boundaries. The imagery began to breathe differently. What was once external began to feel interior. There was a sense that the work was no longer just documenting the world, but gesturing toward an inner climate, a personal and poetic realm waiting to be shaped by intuition and memory.
In this transitional phase, Backhaus maintained a certain visual lyricism, but it no longer relied on subjects or stories. Instead, she began to shift her focus toward essence—toward distilling mood, silence, and light into forms that defy categorization. These visual meditations marked the earliest expressions of her abstraction, even if they had not yet shed their figurative skin completely. The seeds had been planted, and abstraction was already taking quiet root in the crevices of her work.
A Voice Foretold: The Curator Who Saw Her Future
Among the pivotal moments in Jessica Backhaus’ transformation was a conversation she had with the late Jean-Christophe Ammann, a respected curator whose intuition and foresight left an indelible mark on her creative psyche. During their exchange, Ammann offered a prophetic insight: that one day, Backhaus would leave behind realism and step into the vast, untethered space of abstraction. At the time, this prediction seemed far from the reality she occupied—rooted as she was in projects that still observed and narrated the visible world.
Yet that moment stayed with her, lingering like a half-remembered refrain. She didn’t fully grasp its meaning then, but she carried it with her. It was not a prescription, but a premonition—an observation rooted in deep understanding rather than instruction. Years later, as her practice organically morphed into new shapes, she would often think of Ammann’s words. With the benefit of hindsight, she now sees how clearly he had seen what she had not yet dared to envision.
His insight was more than a personal note—it was a validation of potential, a reflection of an artist in the process of becoming. His confidence in her future direction affirmed that what she was experiencing was not a detour but a deeper form of arrival. The artworks she creates today, filled with light and ambiguity, serve as quiet echoes of that early encouragement. They are, in a sense, conversations continued in his absence—a tribute to a guide who saw her not only for who she was but for who she could become.
A Gradual Erosion of Structure: Letting Go of Literalism
The path from realism to abstraction is rarely paved in certainty. For Backhaus, it involved an internal recalibration—a letting go of the need to define or capture the world in direct terms. Instead of pursuing precision, she began cultivating a kind of visual ambiguity—an aesthetic rooted not in clarity, but in openness. Shapes became looser, boundaries softer, and the emphasis shifted from subject to sensation.
This erosion of structure was not an abandonment of rigor but rather a reorientation of it. Her compositions became more distilled, but also more demanding in their subtlety. In relinquishing overt narrative, Backhaus embraced the challenge of visual minimalism: to evoke profound emotional and conceptual responses with the most restrained visual gestures. It required an exquisite sensitivity to balance, space, and light. In this refined approach, even the smallest fold, the gentlest curve, or the faintest shadow became a potent element of meaning.
As she moved deeper into abstraction, her reliance on instinct grew stronger. No longer guided by subjects or thematic constraints, she found herself leaning into intuition, allowing materials and light to lead the way. Paper, in its delicacy and malleability, became a companion. Sunlight became her silent collaborator, shaping the contours of her compositions in real time. Her role shifted from director to participant—responding rather than dictating, listening rather than imposing.
This way of working was not just a change in style; it reflected a philosophical evolution. It suggested a trust in the ephemeral, a reverence for impermanence, and an acknowledgment that the most essential truths might only be glimpsed in passing moments—never held, only felt.
Light as Emotion: Toward a New Visual Language
One of the defining features of Backhaus’ abstract work is her unique relationship with light—not as illumination, but as emotion. Light, for her, is not a backdrop but a central character. It moves, changes, distorts, enhances, disappears. It creates atmosphere, rhythm, and tension. Within her compositions, light becomes the element through which feeling is rendered visible.
Her works in series like Plein Soleil bear witness to this phenomenon. Paper is bent, tilted, arranged—but it is the light that completes the image. It casts shadow, ignites color, or softens an edge into translucence. Each composition is a fleeting interaction between control and spontaneity, presence and evanescence. The final image is not just about what is seen, but how it is felt—how light makes the ordinary ethereal and how abstraction allows us to experience this transformation without distraction.
In embracing abstraction, Jessica Backhaus has also embraced ambiguity, nuance, and the poetry of form. Her journey has not been about discarding the past, but about distilling it into its most essential components. Every phase of her evolution builds upon the last, resulting in a body of work that is deeply coherent, yet remarkably expansive.
Her transition from literalism to lyricism is more than stylistic—it is spiritual. It is the story of an artist trusting her own rhythm, finding solace in the unknown, and allowing her intuition to lead her beyond the visible world into one shaped by light, silence, and imagination. In this space, her art does not declare—it suggests. It does not explain—it invites. And in that gentle invitation, she offers the viewer a quiet, transformative encounter with beauty in its most essential form.
Crafting with Light: The Alchemy of Materials and Moment
Within the contemplative realm of Plein Soleil, Jessica Backhaus has developed a method of creation that transcends conventional artistic practices. Her process is neither mechanical nor analytical; it is grounded in intuition, guided by the silent rhythm of sunlight, and steeped in a reverence for materials as conduits of feeling. Rather than capturing the world, she builds her own intimate landscapes out of the simplest components—colored paper, daylight, and time. These seemingly ordinary materials become instruments of transformation, revealing extraordinary visual complexity through fleeting interactions with natural light.
What sets her approach apart is the purity of her medium. She works without elaborate setups, artificial lighting, or digital alteration. Her space is quiet, often domestic, where spontaneity can thrive. It is a space where form emerges gently rather than forcefully. The process evokes a sense of ritual, of slow engagement with the present moment, and of an openness to the unpredictable. Backhaus becomes both artist and observer, responding to what unfolds before her rather than dictating its outcome. In this way, her work is a collaboration with chance, an improvisation in real time.
Her materials, though humble, are used with precision and sensitivity. Paper—cut, curved, layered—acts as a sculptural element. Light is never just illumination; it becomes the catalyst that breathes life into these silent forms. The interaction between the tangible and the intangible lies at the heart of her artistic philosophy. As light shifts and shadows evolve, each composition changes subtly until, in an instant, it reveals something that feels both intentional and inevitable. That is the moment she captures—a fragile, radiant convergence that can never be exactly repeated.
Ephemeral Installations: The Beauty of Fleeting Compositions
Each session of creating is unique, governed by the quality of light, the positioning of the paper, and the emotional tone of the day. On luminous mornings, Backhaus arranges her paper pieces on a flat surface, often near a sun-drenched window or beneath an open sky. The materials are gently coaxed into shape—not rigidly folded, but softly curved, layered, angled. These arrangements, while temporary, hold a quiet vitality. They become sculptural vignettes, suspended between stillness and movement, harmony and distortion.
As sunlight pours through the space, it casts intricate shadows and refracted hues across the paper forms. Colors bleed into one another, shadows stretch and compress, textures become more pronounced or dissolve into translucence. These moments cannot be manufactured—they can only be noticed. Backhaus waits patiently, attuned to the atmosphere, until the visual cadence feels complete. She moves around the installation, responding to how light alters each composition from every angle. When the alignment of elements reaches a point of aesthetic and emotional balance, she takes the image—not to fix it in time, but to honor its transient truth.
This act of creation resembles performance. Music often accompanies her, providing rhythm to her hand movements and influencing the pacing of her visual decisions. It is a dialogue between inner emotion and outward form, between silence and sound, between light and material. Each piece becomes not just a static image, but a residue of movement, a trace of something momentarily whole. The installations vanish as quickly as they emerge, dismantled once the light changes. Yet their imprint endures, captured through her lens as an ode to impermanence.
The Sacred Role of Intuition in the Creative Act
Backhaus’ entire creative methodology is governed by an intuitive sensibility that transcends technical decisions. She does not storyboard, sketch, or pre-visualize her compositions. Instead, she arrives at each session with openness and curiosity, guided more by emotion than by strategy. Her hands move instinctively, coaxing the paper into new dialogues of color and form. Her eye responds to nuance—the way light refracts through a crease, the subtle warmth in a shade of red, or the tension in a particular shape’s edge.
Intuition, for her, is a form of listening—listening to what the materials suggest, to how the light behaves, and to what emotions rise up as she works. There is no formula or repetition in her process. Each image is singular because it arises from a particular confluence of inner and outer conditions. She likens this to a form of meditation, where being fully present is not only necessary but essential. In this heightened state of awareness, she creates with clarity and restraint, allowing her instincts to guide every decision.
There is also a quiet courage in working this way. The artist must trust the unknown, resist the urge to overwork, and recognize when the composition is complete—not because it is perfect, but because it has said all it needs to say. Backhaus does not seek perfection in a conventional sense; she seeks resonance. Her works are successful not when they fulfill a visual template, but when they stir something intangible—when they feel complete in their vulnerability, their lightness, their brevity.
Light as Medium, Message, and Metaphor
What elevates Backhaus’ work beyond technical elegance is her nuanced understanding of light as both a physical and emotional phenomenon. In Plein Soleil, light does not merely illuminate the forms—it activates them. It shifts their meanings, defines their contours, and breathes temporal life into static material. It is through the quality of light that her images become transformative, moving from surface beauty to something more profound and resonant.
Light, in her compositions, functions on several levels. It serves as a literal medium, shaping how colors are perceived and how depth is rendered. It becomes a co-creator, intervening in ways that are beyond the artist’s control, yet central to the outcome. But it also functions metaphorically. Light in her work symbolizes presence, clarity, and the beauty of fleeting moments. It reminds the viewer of the fragility of time and the importance of witnessing the present fully. Her images do not attempt to freeze time but to elevate its passage—transforming the ephemeral into something reverent and alive.
This reverence for light as a living material echoes across the entire series. Every image is a distillation of contrast: color and shadow, density and transparency, form and emptiness. Through these juxtapositions, she creates a visual poetry that invites contemplation. The viewer is not merely shown an object or arrangement; they are invited into an atmosphere, a sensation, a state of being.
Backhaus’ work offers a quiet resistance to visual overload. In a cultural landscape saturated with excess, her compositions return us to the essential—to what can be felt with very little. With grace and precision, she demonstrates that the most powerful artistic gestures are often the most understated. In Plein Soleil, the interplay of paper and sunlight becomes a timeless meditation on the nature of beauty, the mystery of perception, and the quiet splendor of the impermanent.
Nonverbal Narratives: Emotion Through Form, Not Figurative Content
Though her compositions abandon narrative in the traditional sense, they are not without storytelling. In fact, they speak volumes—just not in words. Color, surface, and spatial relationships communicate moods more evocatively than language ever could. There’s a slow-burning lyricism in these images, where each fold of paper and sliver of light becomes a metaphor for memory, clarity, or transience.
In Plein Soleil, storytelling becomes spatial rather than sequential. A single red shape might conjure intensity, while a softly curved shadow might suggest introspection. The emotion resides not in representation, but in resonance. Her minimalist approach becomes a vessel for contemplation—a way to experience feeling without narrative constraints.
Each piece invites stillness. And within that stillness, viewers find the space to interpret, reflect, and respond personally. The work doesn’t tell you what to feel—it asks you to discover it.
Chasing Light: Environmental Necessity and Creative Geography
One of the most concrete challenges Backhaus encountered while working on Plein Soleil was a lack of sunlight during Berlin’s long, gray winters. Since her work is dependent on direct, unfiltered natural light, this climatic limitation became a creative impasse.
The solution was radical but necessary: she relocated temporarily to the South of France, a region known for its clarity of light and painterly atmosphere. There, surrounded by warmth and luminescence, she found the conditions to work freely. In this sun-drenched setting, the visual language of Plein Soleil could flourish.
The sunlight became more than a tool—it evolved into a symbol of creative vitality, emotional alignment, and artistic clarity.
Light as Language: Symbol, Emotion, and Radiance
In Backhaus’ artistic lexicon, light is never merely functional. It becomes both metaphor and material. Light represents hope, a willingness to engage with the world in its most luminous form. It signifies emotional endurance, clarity in times of confusion, and the human drive to seek out wonder despite adversity.
Where darkness may suggest loss or uncertainty, light in her work becomes an active agent of resilience. It reveals, it renews, it heals. Through its ever-shifting presence, light transforms each photograph into an act of optimism. This thematic layering of illumination as both visual and symbolic makes her work deeply moving on levels both conscious and subliminal.
Influence Without Borders: Painting, Sculpture, and the Expansive Eye
Jessica Backhaus’ aesthetic is shaped by a lifetime of immersion in diverse artistic forms. She spent her youth wandering through museums, absorbing not only the colors and textures of artworks but also their emotional cadences. Influences like Helen Frankenthaler, Etel Adnan, Sonia Delaunay, Yves Klein, and Mark Rothko remain vivid in her visual memory.
While she began her creative life grounded in image-making, her sensibility was always cross-disciplinary. Her work now seems to straddle multiple traditions at once—it inherits the color harmonies of painting, the dimensionality of sculpture, and the emotional ambiguity of visual poetry. Her compositions live at the intersection of these influences, yet speak in their own quiet, untranslatable voice.
A Quiet Invitation: Connection Beyond the Literal
Backhaus does not dictate how viewers should feel. Instead, she offers her work as a reflective pool, where individuals may discover something personal, even ineffable. Whether the viewer experiences joy, longing, stillness, or something entirely unnameable, the intention is not to impose but to inspire.
She sees her work as akin to poetry—minimal, precise, and emotionally layered. Just as a few lines of verse can shift a reader’s entire emotional state, so too can a single curve of shadow or a carefully chosen color in her work.
Her art does not demand interpretation. It simply asks to be felt.
Guidance for the Experimental: Cultivating an Abstract Language
For those drawn to abstraction and minimalism, Backhaus encourages an internal compass. Intuition is paramount. Let it guide choices of color, shape, framing, and tone. In a visual discipline where every line or shadow carries meaning, one must cultivate a sensitivity to the smallest details.
She also champions restraint. Simplicity, she says, is not emptiness—it is refinement. To say more with less is a powerful creative strategy. A single light beam, thoughtfully composed, can speak volumes about presence, perspective, or possibility.
Persistence is essential. Artistic evolution is seldom linear, and failure is not an end but a threshold. Embrace the mistakes, the dead-ends, the moments of doubt—they are the compost of transformation. Sometimes, the greatest clarity comes only after losing one’s way.
Beyond the Frame: A Medium for the Immaterial
Jessica Backhaus' work challenges the assumption that visual image-making must be literal or documentary. Her practice demonstrates that the visual medium, when liberated from narrative, can still articulate emotion, provoke thought, and evoke presence.
Her compositions invite stillness in a world addicted to speed. They allow us to see without explanation, to feel without language. In doing so, they remind us that creativity is not always about constructing meaning—it is often about discovering it.
As she continues to push the boundaries of abstraction, light remains her collaborator, her compass, and her muse. Through Plein Soleil, Backhaus offers not only a collection of images, but a philosophy—one where light becomes a gentle force for connection, transformation, and the quiet power of seeing anew.
Final Reflections:
In Plein Soleil, Jessica Backhaus offers more than an exploration of light—she presents a profound meditation on presence, perception, and artistic purpose. Her abstract compositions transcend traditional expectations, inviting us into a world where the invisible becomes visible, and where simplicity reveals hidden depths. The brilliance of her work lies in its quiet radicalism: by reducing her tools to the essentials—paper, sunlight, and instinct—she uncovers an astonishing emotional range. In doing so, she reminds us that the most resonant art often emerges not from excess, but from clarity and restraint.
Backhaus' approach is poetic in its essence. Every fold of paper, every elongated shadow, every saturated hue operates as a stanza in a visual poem. But unlike conventional poetry, these verses unfold without language. They rely on atmosphere and suggestion, tapping into subconscious emotion and individual interpretation. This invites viewers to slow down, to observe with attention, and to let themselves be affected not by what is being said, but by what is being felt.
Her choice to shift away from realism is not an escape from the world, but a deeper engagement with its essence. By stepping outside the confines of literal storytelling, Backhaus delves into a more ambiguous, open space where new meanings are free to arise. In doing so, she encourages us to trust our instincts—not only as viewers, but as creators of our own understanding. Her work is not about giving answers, but about making space for questions to surface, beautifully unresolved.
Perhaps this is where the real magic of Plein Soleil lies: in its capacity to connect us with what is ephemeral and yet enduring—light, movement, emotion, memory. In a time saturated with visual noise and digital saturation, her images act as sanctuaries of calm, offering a brief, luminous pause. They remind us of the value of attention, the richness of nuance, and the extraordinary beauty found in what is often overlooked.
Ultimately, Plein Soleil is more than a series of photographs—it is a philosophy, a practice of seeing the world not for what it is, but for what it could become when we allow light to guide us.
