Parallel Universes
In Gustavo Schmidt's recent paintings we have two contrasting universes: modern still lifes that are anything but still and
the stilled (in the spiritual sense-slowed, concentrated) lives of Orthodox Jewish community.
Both are based on realist painting traditions and both are located
indoors but one describes timeless and time-honored practices of a religious group, the other reflects a world on the go.
One is done in front of the subject and the other from photographs. Schmidt's choice of color and the quality of paint application
are also in two different and mutually exclusive spheres. The objects and bags on the table are painted in a brighter more
pastel set of colors while the Jewish paintings have the dark rich hues of Italian Renaissance paintings.
Schmidt's still life fit within the tradition of still life
painting's restful love of objects in contained spaces that satisfy both the artist and the viewer's need for stable compositions
that see things in order. In his work, there is a celebration of the pleasures of the simplest things from a loaf of bread
to cloves of garlic. Essential to his work is the seen or unseen container, first and for most the table and then its subsets
of bags, boxes, nets and jars and their relationship to the edge of the canvas, itself an object and a container. In Clarinet,
an open black music case sits on a red patterned table covering, as rich as blood or wine against the snow-white background.
Vermeer who used to like to fill the front of his canvases with similarly colored Oriental carpets spilling over tables as
barrier between viewer and the more tempting action of the middle ground. Schmidt triumphs over reds' tendency to push forward
and lucks it firmly in the middle ground because he has a different methodology for thwarting intimacy. He uses the off center
black rectangle of the music case to echo the edge of the painting-a box within a box. His dark center is pure Malevich-being
versus nothingness. In this painting and others like it such as Barney's New York, Taking a Break and even Peaches,
he reverses Malevich's polarity. The dark center is like a cosmic black hole and it is easy to imagine that with a sweep
of the hand, the close of the lid the painter/magician can make it all disappear. It may look real, but all we see is also
an illusion.
Part of the pleasure of still life lies in the act of painting from life in front of a subject whose fixity, lack movement,
of simply just being there promotes a contemplative state on the part of the artist. Schmidt is also clearly interested in
the mysterious effect of light upon material substance, in other words reality as given to the eyes. However, for all their
stillness his still lives are far removed from the idea of still life as nature morte. They are rarely eternal moments
set outside of time but rather embody a sense of flux and change, a quality of just passing through. The crumbled bags that
are a feature of many of them such as Peaches suggest that our relationship to food production or clothing manufacture has
shifted from the earth to the local supermarket or department store. He not only updates our roles and hunters and gatherers
to the late 20th century but also points to the quantity of bags that populate our coming and going and how the play of their
shapes and textures is as much part of our lives as the things they carry. The sensuality of the crispy, yeastiness of bread,
the firmly buttery green flesh of avocados, the sweet juice of peaches is contrasted with the materials that let us bring
them home-- thick, brown paper shopping bags slightly crumbled with use, the shiny, lacquer like quality of the shopping bags
from upscale stores that suggest wealth and power with the armor of their surfaces; fragile, clear plastic shrouds for bread
and the green netting that seems like it would be more at home in the field or the sea then capturing heads of garlic
and binding them together in their own little world.
Once
you add two or more objects, there is no such thing as a wholly abstract composition in still life. The objects enter a dialogue,
become body doubles or game pieces in the terrain of relationships. At times, it seems as if Schmidt has let the objects define
the relationships and compose the painting. In and Bread and Garlic his food stuffs are similar in mass but separated into
two distinct islands, as are the two small leaves in a large bowl in Autumn Leaves, as if to say we may seem like we are together
but actually we are distinct individuals. Other objects, such as the rolls in Bread and Plastic have a fondness for bundling
in threes.
For all their superficial stillness, Schmidt's still lives are restless fragments of every day life, way stations, a brief
stopping place. Nowhere is this clearer than in his two studies of conventional clutter, Coins and Corner. In most paintings
of interiors or photographs in architectural or shelter magazine, the spaces are open and ordered and every object knows its
place. But in real life as Peto showed us in his 19th century still lives of what would be today bulletin boards, our lives
are usually filled with messy nooks and crannies, irrational collections of stuff that is often more telling than the big
picture. Why do people have trouble spending change, unloading the days-unwanted harvest of coins into glass jars recycled
from household use? Schmidt may not have a direct explanation of this common oddity but his painting of an ordinary glass
jar of coins caught in a momentary beam of light alone on a shelf captures and fixes this normally invisible activity giving
it the quality of a reliquary and in doing so he proves that still life painting is an ever changing mirror of who we really
are.
The Jewish portraits, genre
scenes (not displayed in this site) and still lives Schmidt's parallel, concurrent work with the still lifes are so different
in color, style and content as to seem to be by another hand. Here he works from photographs. The powerful attraction
of this subject matter to him is that it offers a strange but real, fascinating timeless alternate universe that exists amongst
us. With fascination and respect he examines this world which he finds as an alternative to the late 20th century alternative
to an everyday life of TV, wars, stock prices, fashion in short the fleeting but insistent sensations of material culture.
For Schmidt the world of Orthodox Judaism is a somewhat unreal, surreal, place to study through his paintings when the world
is too much with him late and soon an oasis hidden within the surface of things. Although he is an outsider, his connection
with this world is deep and respectful. He gives the figures the solemnity and deep rich color of Giovanni Bellini's religious
genre scenes such as the Circumcision. At other times, the figures have an intent stillness as if ruled by the principles
of solid geometry that gave Piero Della Francesca's figures their monumental quietude.
Schmidt's painting
Studying that shows a scholar deep in thought is reminiscent of Renaissance paintings of St. Jerome in his study. These
paintings were not so much about the scholarly habits of a particular saint but an introduction of a new concept of space,
the studiolo. This was the first room expressly designed for fostering privacy and solitude and the creation of the individual
apart from the gestalt of family/society. The use of the seated silhouette (a cubic form in a cubic room) aligns the figure
with the edges of the canvas reinforcing concepts of private space, especially that of the mind.
Schmidt's
genre paintings have great descriptive immediacy that is given solemnity through his use of light and emphasis on the underlying
geometry of the figures. In Bar Mitzvah, three men stand under a glowing canopy that may be architectural but also symbolizes
the light of God. The light from the canopy strikes the similarly shaped table bearing the fat scroll of Torah underneath
it and bounces off the white shawled figures. This area of luminosity contrasts with the paintings dark corners suggesting
the religious practice shown here carves a special space out of darkness. In Teaching we enter a small book filled room
with a group of young boys studying on either side of a long table. We are made to seem as if we are intruders disturbing
the students' concentration as the black and white clad figure of the teacher and the row of four round faces of the boys
he is teaching turn from their studies to look at us. Here Schmidt uses light in the same way George de la Tour did
to concentrate focus on the spiritual and give the figures a quality of solidity as if they are carved out of stone. In the
Shmvrah Matzo factory, Crown Heights Schmidt places clumps of busy bakers under pyramids of light in an otherwise plain room.
Each isolated island of activity is devoted to a separate stage in the process of Matzoh making. In palette, composition and
theme Schmidt's work has much in common with American scene painters of the thirties such as Grant Wood and George Tooker.
Like them he takes the banal, the ordinary, the invisible and treats it with the greatest dignity giving the passing moment
the solidity of the eternal.
Portraits generally function within a specific context of remembrance whether
it is within a family (this is a picture of my grandmother) or within a government or corporation. It takes a special
quality for a portrait to succeed on its own when you have little initial relationship to the sitter. There is a fierce, transcendental
gentleness and wisdom in the portraits of Rabbi Menahem Schneerson both as a child and as a grown man. This is especially
true in Portrait II where the Rabbi leans on his arm. Like Domenico Ghirlandaio's portrait of A Man and his Grandson (1480-90)
or Ingres's portrait of Louis Bertain. Schmidt triumphs over the drawbacks of the viewer's reaction to a portrait of a stranger
and creates a climate of empathy and compassion between the subject and the viewer. Just as the Mona Lisa's eyes are supposed
to follow you and include you in her gaze, Schmidt's portrait of Schneerson presents him as a universal wise, kind grandfather,
the pater familias who will love us and protect us. The power of this work lies in its ability to communicate directly even
though it was done by an outsider and not by one of the Rabbi's many followers who believed in his spiritual leadership.
Ann Sargent Wooster
Ann-Sargent Wooster:
Artist, art critic.
Education: BA, Bard College; MA, Hunter College; CUNY
One-person exhibitions include: Franklin Furnace, Artists Space, The New Arts Program
Group exhibitions include: Art
In General; Nexus Gallery, Philadelphia; New Langdon Arts, San Francisco; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; A.I.R.; Institute
for Contemporary Art, Boston; The Kitchen
Publications include: 7 Days, The Village Voice, Art in America, Afterimage, Video Times, Glass, New York Arts
Journal, Artforum, ARTnews, Drama Review, Video Art: Theory and Practice, Contemporary Masterworks
Author: Making Their Mark: Woman Artists Move Into the Mainstream;
Time Capsule: A Concise Encyclopedia by Women Artisits; American Art Since 1945; Quiltmaking, a Modern Approach. Catalog
essays in: Buky Schwartz and The First Generation: Women and Video 1970-75
Awards include: New York Foundation
for the Arts; New York State Council on the Arts; Helena Rubenstein Fellow, Whitney Museum of American Art; Gottlieb Foundation
Grant; Black Maria Festival; Logan Grant; Northern National Art Competition.
