I've been delectating Kaiserin's funny, barbed aesthetic of comic and erotic indulgence (the magazine for "boys with problems").
Pleasant to encounter the rather cultlike party people of Mort aux Jeunes, and to encounter sketches like the one in which a stylistic appraisal is made of a 20th century French serial killer (who meticulously documented her work).
The magazine has the strangest smell. It will mess with your head. I've never smelled this particular aroma in any mag. Doubtless this has something to do with the manufacturing process. Or does it? It would be in keeping with a magazine like this to play some sort of strange olfactory joke. It's rather a bracing smell which is clinical, industrial and yet somehow sexual at the same time. Rather like the aesthetic of the mag. No, it doesn't smell like boys with problems. I think it smells more like a gay architect's mind.
Much to love in Issue Seven, including Tom Burr's almost found (presque trouve?) sculpture, which is featured on the cover as well--schematics of frustrated desires and erotic balancing acts. But my eye was drawn to the lush paper sculptings of Mathias Schmied. Schmied was Swiss-born (Bern, 1976) but currently lives and works in Crest, a small town outside of Lyon.
He's known for his manipulations of image through paper cuttings, and his work often takes the form of three-dimensional sculptures en papier, often using vintage porn.
In the series before us here, he drapes his reclining women, seductresses, with a fringe of the very substance of which their illusive presentation is composed; he hides them behind thin slit strips of flesh rags. This drapery could be interpreted as the feint of seduction, but it tends to have a minatory effect. We're not quite sure what's hiding under there--or even whether this veiling is amatory or funebral. We think of how erotic photography and serial killers are both often obsessed with draping the nude in other skins, in animal skins. One thinks of Ed Gein or the character he inspired in Silence of the Lambs. The colors in this sampling of the artist's work tend towards the hotter end of the spectrum, with red and yellow predominating, so part of us feels these creatures are indeed "dressed to get fucked." But what's behind the Veil?
Of course, there is some humorous quoting going on here. Drip paintings go back at least as far as Francis Picabia, and it would be hard not to read these eerie collage sculptures as updatings of art created by delicious drippers like Morris Louis.
Schmied is a splendid colorist and it's this gift which gives the works their opulence. These sculptures en papier perform a valuable work of synthesis; they've hearkened to the lessons in optics given in the waters of Giverny as well as the experiments along these lines in the sixties by the masters of op art. Schmied, like most savant contemporary visual artists, is a true recombinatorialist. His work slices the eye in effigy--the archeological strata of different periods of image production are compressed and collapsed in these strange Sirens on the wall.
Above: Morris Louis/Mathias Schmied.
A very brief article on Schmied can be viewed here: Mathias Schmied at Stylecrave
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