Niklaus Manuel Güdel: painting and its double in Moutier

If the figure of Janus is familiar to Niklaus Manuel Güdel – and gives his name to the film dedicated to him by Claude Stadelmann (release planned for the beginning of November) – it is because the artist with the first name inherited from the Bernese painter and reformer Niklaus Manuel Deutsch seems to have been placed, from birth, under the sign of a double identity. Of Swiss and Costa Rican origin, Niklaus grew up in Switzerland, between the Jura and the Bernese countryside, but also in Costa Rica where, from early childhood, he made regular trips. He says he was “born cut in two” and “always wanted to write and paint at the same time”. Intellectual and artist, art historian and painter, also director of the Ferdinand Hodler Institute (previously Archives Jura Brüschweiler) and curator of exhibitions, Niklaus Manuel Güdel contradicts all the simplistic divisions between left brain and right brain, between spirit of geometry and spirit of finesse.