AUREL SCHMIDT
Feature: 5.1
Art
PLAGUE OF SURFACES: AUREL SCHMIDT MAKES ORNAMENT FROM EXCREMENT
wordsby nicholas brown photoscourtesy peres projects
There’s something immensely satisfying yet equally unsettling about Aurel Schmidt’s recent works on paper. Intricately rendered accretions of objects and creatures that include flies, cockroaches, cigarette butts, dog fur, maggots and used condoms-the detritus of city life-are arranged into a series of monstrous faces in montage style. In comparison with past work that deployed abstract line and colour, here Schmidt has amplified not only the level of detail and expansiveness, but also dispensed with the decorative qualities of ornamentation in the service of a much more grotesque vision of decay and excess…
