Unclassifiable and protean, Gérald Schmite's ceramic universe draws freely from the iconographic repertoire of classical painting and sculpture, subverting its conventions in a highly personal, contemporary reinterpretation. Both heirs to ancient art and fiercely dissident, his pieces combine heterogeneous aesthetics that gleefully disrupt their distant models. Schmite overturns codes as he turns his vases inside out, imbuing their apparent classicism with a provocative unease.
The clash of references and styles produces bewildering juxtapositions within his reconstituted family of ceramics, where Hermes, Louis XVI, and the goddess Hera appear without hierarchy. Beauty constantly rubs shoulders with strangeness and whimsy: witness his solemn Holofernes repurposed as a tureen or his majestic Henri IV emerging as a candlestick from the layered folds of his oversized ruff.
This unique collection depicts a baroque world populated by objects that exaggerate and overflow: pot-bellied vases overflowing with decorative sketches, lamps with unrestrained reliefs, swirling crucifixes. Each piece testifies to a deliberate formal freedom, where ornament proliferates and function dissolves into sculpture.
The use of color also contributes to this flamboyant update of an imagined past: deep blues, acid greens, and vertiginous reds complete the effect, lending an audacious luster to her timeless earthenware. These bold chromatic choices definitively wrest her creations from any nostalgic temptation, anchoring them in a provocative contemporary style.
