Bastienne Schmidt has a roving eye, eagerly assimilating the world around her. Her most recent body of published work, Topography of Quiet, demonstrates her extraordinary ability as an artist to visualize the myriad details surrounding her, then filter them through the screen of her artistic sensibilities. Once in the studio, the images she visualizes become larger than the sum of their parts. The reasoning is straight-forward: She believes the quiet corners of the ordinary world have important things to teach us—about order and chaos, balance and form, identity and sense of place. Any transformation of non-trivial data into an image will leave out information, but what lies just beyond the frame of a Schmidt photograph, or just beyond the edge of the canvas, speaks as convincingly to her compositions as what she opts to include. xxxxxx

If the most important criteria is that her visualizations must provide a way to learn something about the world around us, she succeeds. Schmidt’s asks us to ‘read’ her work by going beyond our ordinary assumptions about our ordered surroundings in search of something more profound. Recognizable forms morph into abstractions, landscapes become typologies, familiar objects of everyday life assume symbolic value, as her work asks us to re-examine the impact our environment has on our imagination—and vice versa.

Right: Pyramid, Cairo, Egypt (2010)

Schmidt combines the routine of her extensive travels—to Egypt, Vietnam, Japan, Burma, Greece and elsewhere—blending real life with her vital and fertile imagination, searching out and documenting divisions of space, markings and mappings, both from out airplane windows and at ground level. Her work, in various media including photography, painting and large scale drawings, is a reflection on the search for identity and place.

The artist recalls, in her interview with Nessia Pope for Topography of Quiet that, “I am creating mind maps that carry visual memories from places that I have been to. Traces and footprints left on the physical ground are reminders of the intangible forces of nature and the randomness of borders created by mankind. In contrast, nature draws borders very clearly—mountains or oceans divide places. I am interested in these spaces in between.” In a previous publication, Home Stills, Schmidt was concerned with places—specifically, metaphors for home and feminine roles tied to the notion of domesticity. In Topography of Quiet, she ventures beyond the restrictions of domicile and motherhood into the broader world. An earlier examination of ‘place’ expands into a broader contemplation of ‘space.’

Left: Incense, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2006)

Image gathering and image making under her new paradigm allows for freedom of movement in a world unencumbered by pretext. Her photographs move close to a subject, or back away until both become abstractions of themselves—readable and recognizable objects and places morph into typologies where concepts like continuity and boundary challenge the viewer’s eye. Through careful editing, seemingly disparate objects are paired, further underscoring the contextual value of shape, color and texture in establishing an artistic narrative.

Schmidt’s paintings are similarly aimed at a search for meaning through an exploration of texture and form. The paper’s surface becomes that same landscape so relevant to her photography—but now Schmidt is the architect and creative force in formulating a topographical significance of her own making. “I use ephemeral materials in the construction of my work: fabric, paper, soaps and coffee. Coffee stains intrigue me, for example. When you pour liquid on a page, there is an element of being in control and not in control. The stains that occur are an expression of space…Every stain has a history and a process.”

Her large works on paper celebrate space, working as effectively as the scattered forms on the page to complete the narrative. Inspired by Japanese and Chinese scroll drawings, Schmidt is drawn to their delicacy and complexity. “I often utilize thumbprints or man-made patterns on layers of transparent paper. At times, I only draw mountains and lakes. They become structures, made by mixing coffee with inks, polymer paints and embedded strings, which I later use as elements in my drawing. I experiment with materials and especially enjoy exploring the absorptive capacity of paper. I guess you could say I am obsessed with stains.”

Left: Untitled, Topos (2013), mixed media on paper, 42 x 90″

Art and Auction notes, “Schmidt uses painting, drawing, and photography to create a transcendental and introspective experience. [She] draws inspiration from her travels to map the effects of our environment on our imagination, and vice versa. Non-pictorial photographic compositions and intricate paintings, such as the three mixed-media Untitled, Topos, 2013, left, evoke ikat prints, Asian scrolls and the rich lapis hues of the Aegean. The images not only bear witness to Schmidt’s peripatetic movements, but also suggest that the act of traveling is a means by which our minds engage in the pursuit of identity.”

A sense of paradox is not lost in Schmidt’s drawings. In Untitled (2010), enigmatic line pairs weave and loop through opens expanses of thick, white paper, like some erratic slot car track. Small ovals of earth-tone color and geometric patterns in red are scattered through the ‘landscape.’ This balanced abstraction only takes on a second layer of meaning on closer examination: The intersections of line are marked by tiny versions of highway over-and-underpasses, a flight of fancy from 20,000 feet where boundless space is seemingly bisected, and bisected yet again by the encroaching hand of civilization.

Right: Untitled, Topos (2012), mixed media on paper, 36 x 70″

In another, Untitled, Topos (2012), Schmidt’s ice blue painting lights up like a sun-filtered glacier or skyward vista at dusk, revealing a distant field of points of light. Thread-like connections between dozens of small spheres of white hint at constellations or scientific measurements (man’s imposition on the natural order of things). Central to the composition is a tangle of braided chord, a complication in an otherwise serene and timeless scene that cannot be ignored. Here, even the cosmos can be co-opted to suit our earth-bound superstitions and ambitions.

I can imagine Bastienne Schmidt being a different type of social activist at another time and place. But, in this life, art is the banner she raises on behalf of social and environmental causes. Her prolific, creative output is a mark of a fertile mind and intrepid political conscience, as she strives to find a visual language to codify the sometimes disordered world around her. In this case, her random acts of kindness are found in the images she produces, accruing to the benefit of all those who share her passion for life. Schmidt’s art speaks to a quest—like those encoded in her memory of long-ago family’s trips—to sort through the myriad of details seen and felt, in search of the expressive connective tissue embodying a vast, wondrous and complex world.

By Richard J. Friswell, Managing Editor

Bastienne Schmidt, Typography of Quiet, Exhibit and Book Launch, through January 15, 2015

Ricco/Maresca Gallery 529 West 20th Street, 3rd Floor

New York, New York 10011

Located in the 529 Arts Building in between 10th and 11th Ave.

Bastienne Schmidt has produced five titles involving her photography and paintings. They were published by jovis Verlag GmbH, Berlin. Her titles and other works of art can be obtained at: www.jovis.de and through the artist at: http://www.bastienneschmidt.com/contact.cfm