BREEZY X WHALE: REINHARD SCHMID
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- Reinhard Schmid, Dragonfish, 2020
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- Reinhard Schmid, Moving SmackMan II, 2018
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- Reinhard Schmid, Ten Degrees of Holiness, 2020
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- Reinhard Schmid, Travelling Smackman, 2020
ABOUT THE PROJECT
$Whale and Breezy started a long-term collaboration to provide a narrative to the $WHALE’s “The Vault”, one of the largest and most valuable collections of NFTs in the entire space through art curation. Each month we highlight a specific creator or theme, providing rich visuals, high-profile artist interviews, gallery events, and more. For the month of May 2022, the presented artist is REINHARD SCHMID.CURATORIAL TEXT
Think about a Ballerina, so elegant and so light. She is delicate and floaty; she can almost fly. And yet, she is gracefully anchored to that same engine that keeps her alive. A heavy, noisy, solid mechanical structure sustaining the most feathery being. Is this automated force imprisoning her or making her free?
The Yin and the Yang, the male and female energies, the calculation and the imagination, the reality and the dream. “Venusmachine” is what the artist Reinhard Schmid calls the process; “the combination of sensuous female energy with the more technical male aspects, often depicted in some kind of machinery.”
So how is it possible, in this perfect balance of forces, to still – at times – feel disoriented?
Reinhard Schmid has always played with technology, mechanics, aesthetics, numbers, creation, tricks. The eternal player, the curious, the insatiable, the forever traveler beyond Hercules Columns. All this is Reinhard Schmid.
Sometimes, the logic of the mechanical parts in his art is purposely inverted. Our eyes feel comfortable with what they see, while our brain recognizes something not familiar, strange, wrong. Some other times, while using technology to create three-dimensional versions of his two-dimensional art, he deliberately draws something that doesn’t work when put in 3d.
The error. The hybrid. The unclear. And yet existing in perfect aesthetic harmony.
What are we looking at with Reinhard’s art pieces? Physical or digital? Vintage or contemporary? Light or heavy? Analog or technological? Old or new?
In Reinhard’s art, there is no distinction between all these opposites. Nothing is conflicting with each other. Anything that seems to be advanced, was in fact already there, only now we have the means to see it. There are no borders, no need to put concepts in boxes. In his works, time is fluid and space never existed.
After all, isn’t our existence like a drop of water going back to the ocean after we … ? Plink.
Eleonora Brizi
PRESS RELEASE
BREEZY CURATES $WHALE presents, for May, Reinhard Schmid.
The artist’s experience starts with traditional art. Before, using drawing pencil and watercolor behind the glass, and in 2008, introducing the oil technique. On the one hand, the intent is to recreate the effect of transparency and brightness of colors, typical of “rarefied” support such as glass, which allows light to pass through; and on the other, to reinterpret the glazing technique specific to Flemish painting.
In fact, with whichever technique he chooses to express himself, Reinhard always brings out the main subject while in the background, both the inner light of the work created by the artist and the external natural one create an overlapping of layers and spaces that act on the depth of the work.
Thanks to digital media, Reinhard enters a new and infinite range of possibilities to investigate different ways of conceiving the space, bringing the legacy of traditional art that becomes the starting point of his digital creations.
In this progressive overlapping of layers, the artist hides messages, thoughts, and feelings made of surreal images, characterized by a humorous or erotic touch, waiting to be unveiled by the viewer.
In 2018 Reinhard starts his experience in the Crypto Art world, where he finds a window into another reality, a new layer of consciousness, virgin land to colonize like a Wanderer between worlds.
The characters he creates in this world seem extracted from the mythology of the 21st century, with the body half-human or, more rarely, animal and the other half mechaniform. Reinhard calls this process the “Venusmachine”, which is “the combination of sensuous female energy with the more technical male aspects, often depicted in some kind of machinery”. With these machines, his protagonists and heroes can move in the digital art space and merge with it. Once again, the medium is permeable to the reality in which it exists.
In 2020 Reinhard joins “The Vault” collection by $Whale, which currently hosts nine works that will be exhibited in the virtual show dedicated to the artist, planned for the end of May on the Arium platform.
ARIUM SHOW
Visit the space: https://arium.xyz/spaces/whale-community-reinhard-schmid
