Andre Schmidt – Pictorial Surfaces as Sedimented Perception
On the First Creative Phase, 2005–2010
The painting of Andre Schmidt is not to be understood as an act of expressive release, but as a disciplined, ethically motivated process of form. Between 2005 and 2010, under this premise, a self-contained body of work emerged, comprising exactly fifty paintings – retrospectively identifiable as his first creative phase. The works were documented in 2011 in an accompanying volume – not as a compilation, but as a means of making visible an inner arc of tension that informs every pictorial decision of those years.
Auswahl aus dem Werkverzeichnis
In these works, the canvas does not serve as a site of narration, but as a reservoir for visual concentration. Central to the compositions are axial structures, configurations of light, and atmospheric depth – without symbolic loading, without demonstrative gesture. This painting does not pursue the visible, but the perceptible: zones of colour, transitions, vegetative directions of movement. What becomes visible is the result of sedimented perception – nourished by observation, memory, and resonance.
Formally, this phase is characterised by a conscious limitation of means: a single brush, a set of three primary colours along with black and white comprise the chromatic vocabulary. This reduction is not a technical exercise, but an expression of attitude – a decision against overdetermination, against illustration, against visual excess. What matters is the image as consequence, not as staging.
The paintings of these years do not originate from a studio-based production in the classical sense. They are the result of a mobile gaze – many motifs emerged mentally during bicycle rides through landscapes, forest edges, and urban peripheries. Their later translation onto canvas does not represent transference, but transformation: these images appear not as depiction, but as distillate.
What characterises this painting is its ethical discipline: the refusal to submit to fashionable narratives, its proximity to contemplation, its insistence on form as stance. Each image resists mere representation in favour of a pictorial practice oriented towards concentration, resonance, and stillness.
Taken as a whole, the fifty paintings from 2005 to 2010 do not form a cycle, but a position – a visualised resistance against expressive appropriation, against iconographic strategies, against the imperative of style. They mark the origin of a body of work whose artistic autonomy arises from ethical consequence.