Li Kehua, Suite I, 2019

Gabriel Schmitz  

Gabriel Schmitz was trained as an artist in various places : his native Germany, Edinburgh (Scotland), Salamanca and Winchester (England); an artistic itinerary which has led to a suggestive work, in line with the German expressionism, with a metaphysical touch to it.

For Gabriel Schmitz painting is a way of introspection which allows him to come to know himself and to communicate. His work reveals a humanistic preoccupation, being centred on the human figure, mainly female, to portray states of introspection in a subtle and lyrical language. His interest lies in registering life as in the language of the body (the expression of faces, of hands seemingly deformed and exaggerated placed in first plane, withdrawn gazes, feet in movement ... ) in detaining that fugitive and eloquent gesture which expresses a state of being as well as a preoccupation.

Following closely other forms of artistic expression like cinema, theatre, dance, music or photography, on which he draws for inspiration, he recollects in his work impressions and fragments of lived moments, registers “experiences of displacement". But what particularly fascinates him is the gestural grammar of dance and the portrayal of both the beauty and the fugitivity of harmonic poses in numerous variations.

To capture the naturalness of movement is one of his dominant themes, be it in dance, in people who walk or run or in the cadence of repose.

Gabriel Schmitz paints a gesture as a silent pause, a suspended accord which paradoxically seems to continue. His work breathes a certain sadness, even in the frenetic exasperation in which his dancers are immersed. In the painter's opinion there is a more profound and complex truth to be found in sadness than in happiness.

His work attracts and seduces on first sight, empresses the viewer because each of us is involved in the hidden theme of all his work : the time that will come into being. His paintings are paintings of time, of movement and of silence. Any real art pursues the harmony of opposites, the exact spot of the encounter of - after Baudelaire - the ephemeral and the eternal, the point of inflection that joins things opposed, and Gabriel Schmitz paints with the impulse ta attempt to immobilise movement, to fix fugitive instants, to detain time.