The depiction of the landscape – forested areas and the tangle of branches in the undergrowth – grows even denser thanks to the colourful texture of the paintings. A tangle of lines and dots coupled with nuanced layers of paint fill the frame and largely blur our perception of the objects. Erik Schmidt draws on the 19th-century tradition of landscape painting in the composition of these works, yet simultaneously overlays this with means drawn from contemporary painting and new media.
All the motifs stem from landscapes in the artist’s homeland, Westphalia. Taking photographs as his point of departure, views of a natural realm come into being in the studio in the act of painting, which unfolds as a process. The paintings reference human beings solely through their absence. The settings in Erik Schmidt’s films pick up on some of the locations portrayed in the paintings.