Unclassifiable and protean, Gérald Schmite's ceramic universe draws freely on the iconographic repertoire of classical painting and sculpture, the better to subvert their conventions in a contemporary, highly personal reinterpretation. Both heirs to ancient art and fiercely dissident, his pieces bring together heterogeneous aesthetics that joyfully shake up their distant models. Schmite overturns codes like he turns his vases upside down, affecting their apparent classicism with a provocative disturbance.
The telescoping of references and styles produces disconcerting cohabitations within his recomposed family of ceramics where we encounter, without hierarchy, Hermes, Louis XVI and the goddess Hera. Beauty constantly rubs shoulders with strangeness and facetiousness: witness his grave Holofernes converted into a soup tureen or his majestic Henry IV emerging as a candlestick from the layered folds of his plethora of ruffs.
This unique collection depicts a Baroque world populated by objects that exaggerate and overflow: pot-bellied vases teeming with decorative sketches, lamps with wild reliefs, swirling crucifixes. Each piece demonstrates an assumed formal freedom, where ornament proliferates and function dissolves into sculpture.
The treatment of color also contributes to this flamboyant update of an imaginary past: deep blues, acid greens and dizzying reds complete the effort to give an insolent luster to his timeless earthenware. These bold chromatic choices definitively free his creations from any nostalgic temptation to anchor them in a provocative contemporaneity.
