Featured Artist Joey Schmidt-Muller

Artist Joey Schmidt-Muller uses oil pastels in a contemporary realist style he calls the “Traumatic Objectivity.” Learn more about the inspiration behind his work by visiting his website.

 

 

It has taken many years of wandering and maturity to flip a switch in my head before my visions bubble up unchecked. Innumerable images come forth which I paint only in my mind.

 

 

The confrontation with socio-critical and traumatic thoughts formed my series “the Traumatic Objectivity,” which is my  way of making a connection with and a continuation of the “New Objectivity” art movement of the 1920s.

 

 

It was an important art movement during the German Reich, and was created immediately after the First World War when many artists turned to socially critical subjects as a reaction against Expressionism. The movement ended in 1933 with the fall of the German Weimer Republic and the rise of the Nazis to power.

 

 

My series, “the Traumatic Objectivity,” features figurative painting and symbolism. After 2015, my style of painting evolved with elements of realism. To stimulate, to create intimacy and to be at the same time a distanced border crosser, I compare my art to collage, even if nothing is really glued on my picture.

 

 

My images invoke the combination of the contradictory and the unequal as the basic pattern of my art.

 

 

We all wear a mask, hiding our thoughts, fears and feelings on a daily basis. My paintings are aimed at guiding the viewer through the reality of our contemporary society by helping in the search for memories.

 

 

My images become a projection surface, a juggling between the intensity of the expressive dimension and the aesthetic component. At the same time they consciously cross the limits of intimacy with drastic and provocative representations. The renunciation of a spatial perspective, the demarcation of bright and dark, light, shadow and lines, is deliberately used to give the surface a form and to make temporality visible with an indicated movement.

 

 

My refusal to follow the path of perfection leaves me room to develop my painting.

 

 

I recognized that using Prussian blue as a color radiates a certain coolness and distance that supports and simplifies the complex messages in my paintings. The renunciation of other colors is intentional—although I sometimes break the monotone by adding red or yellow to grab attention and to disrupt the human need for harmony.

 

 

Confrontation irritates people who have fixed values. This is exactly where I see the difference between my work and a self-sufficient art that deals with form and color problems and no longer with reality-related content.

 

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