Andreas Huber

Florian Schmidt

29 Mar - 17 May 2008

FLORIAN SCHMIDT
"forms, terms"

March 29th - May 17th, 2008
Opening: Friday, March 28th, 2008 7 pm

Florian Schmidt’s exhibitions have taken on an installative character; his artistic works span a range of techniques and methods: together, drawings, mural paintings, paintings, and sculpture form an entity.
The given space and its potentialities are explored and imagined, expanding limits. The wall drawing „belt“ incorporates differently wide arcs of the crossbeam vaults, using them as a measure for circles which run over one wall in both gallery rooms. Thanks to their sketch-like gesture, the drawn circles’ decor is presented as draft, as an artificial possibility that the viewer can carry on, thus capturing the complete space affected. The space, in imagination opened and by these means deprived of its intimacy, virtually holds the other works out to the viewer. „extended isolation“, a standing cylindric form with a coated and finished surface hardly hides its haptical qualities of being a reworked roll of insulating material. Its softness has been preserved; with its presence that literally blocks the space, it is handicap, architectural quotation, and a piece of furniture all in one.
Also some pictures, actually material collages—sewn together, woven into each other, and edited numerous times—share common visual codes. They are perceived in terms of their concreteness. Here, too, the traditional visual code is complemented by a strong haptical quality. The same goes for the drawings which, thanks to their actual complexity and their framing, become a kind of spacial manifestation, small imaginary rooms that don’t come to an end at their corners or edges.
While wall drawing, sculpture and drawings are expansive, the paintings show in the opposite direction. What seems to be the essence due to abstract forms and colouration is elaborately surrounded with strongly mixed colours. Thus, the supposed void becomes the foreground; the elaborate forms are embedded within a background, and are eliminated by the viewer. Florian Schmidt’s works liberate a thinking in possibilities, their materiality is clearly secularistic, their imaginary potential opens (mental) spaces that add more to the construct of manifold worlds of experience possible today, as if to emphasise something
Axel Jablonski
 

Tags: Florian Schmidt