Valérie Kolakis & Florian Schmidt

16 Nov-17 Dec 2022

PV 16 Nov 2022, 6-8pm

Overview

FOLD is pleased to present Previously Unthought of Things; a two person show by Valérie Kolakis and Florian Schmidt.

“As soon as architecture begins to be thought about, its ideogram should be so touched by the "as found' as to make it specific-to-place. Thus the 'as found' was a new seeing of the ordinary, an openness as to how prosaic 'things' could re-energize our inventive activity. A confronting recognition of what the post-war world actually was like. In a society that had nothing. You reached for what there was, previously unthought-of things....”

Allison and Peter Smithson – The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found’//1989

Valérie Kolakis is interested in the makeshift, the provisional and the ways in which we process and adapt to our environments. As we grapple with issues of social isolation and fragmentation that is reinforced through physical separation and boundaries, the work in this exhibition is a reimagining how we engage with the domestic space and the urban fabric around us.

Researching concepts of home, belonging and identity raises questions such as: What objects do we need? What materials do we use? What do we discard or throw away? And what do we keep or take with us? Kolakis’s work explores the unknown and unfamiliar within the urban environment, specifically, the feeling of being uprooted and the multitude of everyday items that interact with that sense of belonging and displacement.

Comprised of elements that hint at both a house in the process of construction and/or abandonment, Kolakis’s work for this exhibition challenges both the reception of, and movement within, the space of the exhibition.

Florian Schmidt constructs wall-related objects, in which he explores the relationship between space, material and color. Schmidt’s way of working reveals itself as a cyclical process of deepening thoughts; a cycle in which existing works reconnect with the dynamic of the working process, for which the factor of repetition appears to be decisive. Often cardboard forms have been mounted inside a frame, which can be viewed as a scene of action. Schmidt takes his compositional cue from already present materials; parts and production remnants from earlier works are used as the basis for new works.

Other works use images of exhibition spaces, buildings, and art institutions as a reference. The images often show the area of the building that is inhabited by the public (the outside facade / staircases / windows / ceilings / participatory installations). In a multi-layered process these images are transformed into reduced line drawings (interstice of cardboard form) on wooden supports and then painted. The use of different colors leads to a hierarchisation of the picture planes and an emphasis on individual forms.

Florian Schmidt’s works seem inconspicuous at first glance. But if the viewer opens himself to experiencing their process of becoming, they prove to be experimental explorations of medial, spatial, and formal questions and offer impressive possibilities of seeing: the interaction of surface and spatial depth and the harmony of colors and forms that lead us to reflect on the limits and definitions of drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Artists