6th – 22nd of Feb. 2012

The new paintings by ever-travelling Hubert Schmalix are, as in the past, determined by ostensible contradictions. Tight rows of geometrically aligned houses present themselves in bright colours – bleached from the sun or lightly covered in snow. With Schmalix, emptiness is never oppressive. The formed spaces are painterly dreams. Reality is kept at bay. The pictorial, on the other hand, is closer, creating a new substantiveness. The vegetative becomes ornamental. Density replaces colourfulness. It may seem obvious, but Schmalix is not concerned with narratives. It is the painterly, the pictorial, that engenders connectedness – or familiarity – and, at the same time, distance.

Günther Holler-Schuster