Natascha Schmitten – Phosphor

‘To engage with Natascha Schmitten’s painting, you need to become involved with an “in-between” that includes unambiguity as much as it does indeterminacy. Neither the pictorial space nor the pictorial subject can be directly grasped at first glance. Even the ambulatory gaze, one that is continually moving, can only slowly – and never fully – reveal the materiality of the images and their structural complexity. For in the mutual interpenetration of theme and technique, complex compositions, intense worlds of colour and light-flooded pictorial spaces are created.

Schmitten uses light as an essential aspect of her work, thinking along with it in the process of painting as she sets individual moments of light with surgical accuracy or evokes the penetration of natural light through precisely placed recesses. A permanent transformation thus seems to be created in the image itself, intensified by the moving gaze and the changing light. The artist explores the intensity, purity and brightness of colours up to their maximum brilliance, merging them with the semi-transparent polyester fabric with which she covers her frames to create “light-bearing” paintings. In this context the surface structure develops its own unique appeal. In some places it appears as if the colour had only touched the fabric by chance, while in others it is as intense as if it had passed through every single fibre. Matte and velvety areas contrast with transparent and glossy layers, at whose transitions streaks and gradients of colour are formed. Thus, alongside the visual, there is a desire for haptic perception.’

From: Cornelia Kratz, Please Oscillate. On the Painting of Natascha Schmitten