SOLO PRESENTATION OF FLORIAN SCHMIDT @ ART BRUSSELS

Solo presentation of Florian Schmidt
April 23rd-26th
Brussels Expo - Halls 1 & 3
Place de Belgique, 1
BE-1020 Brussels
www.artbrussels.be

Else.
For several years now, Florian Schmidt has been working with closely connected sculptural and painterly elements. Elements of primary pieces, be they painterly or sculptural, are literally re-used and transformed in new pieces. The re-use and transformation engage a dialog with art history. Frames, canvas, collages, papier maché and plaster are used as building elements, forming a fluid typology. In this way, Florian Schmidt has a lot to do with early European Avant-gardes; as per nature his works explore the constituent of pieces. 
Florian Schmidt tends to three-dimensional acting in the two-dimensional space. The frame works is treated as content, exploring the borders of painting and objects in space. He reenacts basic sculptural gestures: modeling, carving, layering, but through a personal system of addition and subtraction. In the process, painted parts get recovered; structures overlap and disappear from view. Traces of past actions remain.

In his solo presentation in Art Brussels, Florian Schmidt presents Else, a series of five sculptures. They are all based on identical plane paper circles. Through bending and folding, addition of papier maché and acrylic gel, each is transformed into a sculpture. While the sculptures are all closed spatial loops, the execution varies and each sculpture gets a different form. 
Making contact at different points of the sculptures, wooden constructions maintain the sculptures in the space at different height. They repose on pedestals themselves of various heights and aspects, but all made of edges. The organic volumes seem to hang dramatically in the space, but are also defined by this practical and geometrical system of presentation.
These sculptures embody circular, non-linear movement sequences, without beginning or end. Even through the sculptures seem ageless, this three-dimensional representation of movement is in opposition to the Modernist imagination of movement, for example in Futurist sculpture. Else is marked by its purposelessness, a body thrown in space.
On the wall behind stands a lacquer painting on a loose black canvas. Through a complex system of folding and painting, the lacquer has recovered the black canvas to the point of leaving apparent only three seemingly overlapping circles. In fact, the remnants of the raw material. The canvas has additionally been folded diagonally, and cut on two sides, leaving the painting hang slightly loose out of the wall. All the elements of folding and contacts points, floating in the space and geometrical structures, which are used to create the sculpture are translated in a pictorial language.