Galleries in Paris

“More printed matter”, Joachim Schmid
Alain Gutharc and the German artist Joachim Schmid, who claims to be a “picture recycler”, have been collaborating since 1995.
The passion of the artist for picture seeking and their assembly gives his work an endless goal, given the thousands of pictures which invade us every day. According to him, their frightening profusion justifies the uselessness of creating new ones. He collects and regroups them into series. They are thus re-vitalized for artistic purposes. Ways of collecting varies: pictures found randomly in the street during strolls, recycled negatives, numeric picture available online with search engines, pictures posted in the press or for advertising purposes… The origin of its pictures is as diverse as the multiple sources which flood us with visuals.
This exhibition, 6th presentation of the artist’s works in the gallery, gathers 2 unseen series.
The “Bilderbuc” series, started in 2011, is a collection of pictures which were initially printed. They are shown without their context and without any comment. Their juxtaposition outside from any explanation questions our relationship to the meaning of what is in front of us. They are not used in order to illustrate an idea, they do not guide us throughout our understanding, they are not able to influence us into an interpretation that could be wrong or misleading. They no longer have a function and appear as they actually are: beautiful, abstract, incongruous, intriguing, confusing, unpleasant… But they also trigger in us the need to give a meaning, to find why, to find how, to find something that could justify their existence.
The “Estrelas amadas – beloved stars”, 2013, takes black and white pictures of movie stars reproduced in a Portuguese magazine in the 1950s. The former owner of the magazine, a young Lisbon woman probably, had coloured the lips of all the
beloved stars with the brightest red, not longer after acquiring the magazine. Decades later, this copy landed on a flea market where the artist in turn acquired it. By selecting this series of photographs, Joachim Schmid recycles these pictures, from the press and reproduced into thousands of copies, made unique and anecdotal by the bright red of the actresses’
lips. Joachim Schmid is interested in photography without practicing it. He questions himself and us about the avalanche of visual information in which we are immersed without even being aware. He raises the question of the multiple and the unique, the meaning and its distortion, by its collecting and gathering into series of pictures from multiple origins.