Glimmers of Hope 211 Painting

From 2012 to date the autodidact created more than 300 works. These "children" are mostly large-format acrylic paintings on canvas. As a graduate of a secondary school that specialises in artistic education, Prof. Laurenz Hudetz influenced him personally. Schmidbauer's works are indirectly influenced by Hubert Scheibl, one of Austria's best-known artists, and by the world star Gerhard Richter. Three philosophical themes define his oeuvre: openness, transformation and hope. The principle of abstraction that Schmidbauer applies can also be artistically discovered in the "Transformation" series. "Abstract" is often seen as the opposite of "figurative". This superficial observation overlooks the fact that the Renaissance invention of perspective painting was the greatest achievement of abstraction – namely, the abstraction from space to surface, from the third to the second dimension. Wassily Kandinsky, at the beginning of the 20th century, found the ideal of abstraction in music. It is no coincidence that many of his pictures bear the title "Composition". His key insight is that the mixing of colours leads to colour tones, just as tones from different instruments become tone colours. Another form of abstraction is abstract thinking and its transformation onto the canvas. For Schmidbauer, artistic abstraction is an approximation of the mind. With even more abstractedness, one can say: abstraction is the approximation of the mental. Changes lead us into unknown spheres, which sometimes awakes fears. But change as a form of de-veloping, un-folding, or dis-covering is a characteristic trait of all life. Fully in line with a bon mot by Jean Paul: "Strong character is brought out by change, weak ones by permanence." From this, one can conclude that change is not only the main theme of Schmidbauer's works, but also of his very working. "To become everything is development in the sense that the possible becomes real." "If there is a sense of reality, then there must also be a sense of possibility," wrote Robert Musil more than two millennia later. Hope ultimately remains that in the end it is not "the eternal return of the same", but the constant change of that which is essential for our life, that leads to a better world. Any attempt to change the world will probably fail. The hope of managing it nevertheless can become a heavy burden.