Erik SchmidtRetreat

What is planned fails, what is thrown off is accepted? Adriano Sack is asking Erik Schmidt in an interview for RETREAT: In your new film „Inizio“ you hold up a sign bearing the word „Paradies“. What part does paradise play in your work and in your dreams?
Erik Schmidt: The attempt to stage life as a paradise is an important driving force for me. When I go somewhere I feel this total fascination, even if it is only a palm-fringed beach. Paradise in the religious sense is of course not what is meant. Rather the state of bliss on earth.
AS: You shot Inizio in the garden of the Villa Massimo in Rome. What does this place mean to you?
ES: It is a very beautiful garden. But the film is not set at the Villa Massimo, it is set in an undefined place. At the time of the shoot Italy was in lockdown, we needed a private retreat.
AS: For the first time in one of your films there is a kind of alter ego, the young actor Christian Erdt. Is there no „Inizio“ for the older artist?
ES: No. Or rather yes. There is such a thing as a new beginning, but there is no going back. The dress the other one slips into does not fit me. I have to carry on where I am.
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AS: „Inizio“ is the companion piece to the film „Fine“, which you shot in Olevano near Rome. „I am a man of the world,“ the film begins, while the protagonist walks towards a house of the dead. What does this thought mean in a small Italian mountain town like Olevano.
ES: It fits, doesn’t it? Don’t people in small towns always think they are men of the world? Anyone who really is one would never think it.
AS: In „Fine“ the artist pours oil over himself. That is a recurring motif in your films. There is constant undressing or dressing, your body is bathed, massaged or doused. What have you not yet done to yourself?
ES: No tattoo. No piercings. Nothing that leaves lasting damage.
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AS: You have painted the Westphalian mixed forest, olive bushes in Israel, palms in Asia. Is there a connection?
ES: There is a formal and structural connection. Plants always have a centre. With the palm pictures I took that to extremes: they are square and in the middle is the nut. Beyond that, though, I am incredibly free when painting trees. With a portrait you are still somehow beholden to the face. With nature nobody can check up on that. Especially when painting over photographs. There I can act completely freely as a painter. It is almost like action painting: I throw paint, it runs and drips. The palm in my paintings is indeed rather battered. But it remains recognisable. (Three short excerpts from Adriano Sack’s interview with Erik Schmidt)

Exhibition:
Kunstraum Potsdam, 18/9 – 30/10/2022