For "The Vault" project by $Whale, Eleonora Brizi introduced Reinhard Schmid's masterpieces on Monday 30th May, on the Arium space: https://arium.xyz/spaces/whale-community

Think about a Ballerina, so elegant and so light. She is delicate and floaty; she can almost fly. And yet, she is gracefully anchored to that same engine that keeps her alive. A heavy, noisy, solid mechanical structure sustaining the most feathery being. Is this automated force imprisoning her or making her free? The Yin and the Yang, the male and female energies, the calculation and the imagination, the reality and the dream. “Venusmachine” is what the artist Reinhard Schmid calls the process; “the combination of sensuous female energy with the more technical male aspects, often depicted in some kind of machinery.” So how is it possible, in this perfect balance of forces, to still - at times - feel disoriented? Reinhard Schmid has always played with technology, mechanics, aesthetics, numbers, creation, tricks. The eternal player, the curious, the insatiable, the forever traveler beyond Hercules Columns. All this is Reinhard Schmid. Sometimes, the logic of the mechanical parts in his art is purposely inverted. Our eyes feel comfortable with what they see, while our brain recognizes something not familiar, strange, wrong. Some other times, while using technology to create three-dimensional versions of his two-dimensional art, he deliberately draws something that doesn't work when put in 3d. The error. The hybrid. The unclear. And yet existing in perfect aesthetic harmony. What are we looking at with Reinhard’s art pieces? Physical or digital? Vintage or contemporary? Light or heavy? Analog or technological? Old or new? In Reinhard’s art, there is no distinction between all these opposites. Nothing is conflicting with each other. Anything that seems to be advanced, was in fact already there, only now we have the means to see it. There are no borders, no need to put concepts in boxes. In his works, time is fluid and space never existed. After all, isn’t our existence like a drop of water going back to the ocean after we … ? Plink. Eleonora Brizi