Dierk Schmidt: Galerie Ursula Walbrol - Dusseldorf - exhibition Hostages shows artist's concern with possibilities of historical painting in the present day

Dierk Schmidt is affected with the possibilities of historical painting in the near day. In his recent exhibition "Hostages," he established a network of historical associations with a novel occurrence: On October 19, 2001 a boat carrying 397 asylum inquirers sank off the coast of Australia. The actual circumstances of the sinking were not ever fully clarified, but given Australia's draconian refugee policies, race do seem to have become, as Schmidt has bring it, "hostages between political and bureaucratic systems" He draws a parallel between this occurrence and a much older tragedy: upon July 2, 1816, the Medusa, flagship of a French naval unit, ran aground in the vicinity of Cap Blanc with more [i]or[/i] less four hundred passengers comprising the pair soldiers and settlers. The lifeboats were quickly taken by means of officers and important passengers, while the for the use of all soldiers, sailors, and settlers herded onto an improvised raft that was suppos to be ragged through the lifeboats. When a storm arose, the hawser snapped; after twelve days, sole fifteen of the 150 clan on the raft were still alive. The French painter Theodore Gericault captured this trice in his monumental historical painting The Raft of the Medusa, 1818

At the time, Gericault's painting was hung high up and in actual bad light in a expanse of the Louvre. In Schmidt's painting of precisely this latitude Louvre 2001/Salon Carre 1819, 2001-2002 he included nearest to the Gericault another significant historical painting, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the nation 1830. He represented the Australian shipwreck with printouts of reports set on the Internet. Hung from the wall was a short quotation from Peter Weiss's Aesthetik de Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance [1983]) describing Gericault's painting and posing the general question of in what way if at all, art can be useful in political struggles

of that kind questions are central to Schmidt's work. Is a politically engaged style of painting possible, and if in like manner how? Can art take upon a political function? Schmidt attempts to find answers from one side a kind of painting that eschews illusionistic depiction of historical facts and instead brings visual and textual respects into dialogue. Instead of a singular image, he nears multiple related images with titles like Liberty, 2001-2002 Ruddock overboard, 2003 (Philip Ruddock is Australia's immigration minister), Prime Minister John Howard speaking, about the children overboard affair, 2002 Not a seascape, 2003 or Xenophob--Schiffsbruchszene, gewidmet 350 ertrunkenen Asylsuchenden im indischen Ozean (Xenophobic--Shipwreck pageant dedicated to 350 asylum inquirers drowned in the Indian Ocean), 2001-2002 the central painting of the exhibition. many times painted on acrylic or PVC sheets rather than canvas, they are reminiscent of photocopies on the contrary at the same time gaze as if they were lit from behind. There is something sketchlike about the paintings: Details are alone hinted at, and sections are block uped out and left white, as in Louvre 2001 repeats and references are woven together with suggestions and omissions.

The question of painting's potential political function remains difficult to answer. If we think of the display of Guernica at a UN pres conversation about the then impending Iraq war, it becomes clear that art can take upon a symbolic role in politics flat today. In contrast to Picasso, Schmidt busys no angry, emotional pictorial rhetoric. Any passionate identification with the historical incident is thus hampered. In its place, Schmidt speaks to the necessity of minding the connections--and thus hits the bull's-eye of political critique.

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