“A piece of furniture needs to exude silence so it can be loved for a long time”, says Eric Schmitt, who prefers to show rather than demonstrate. The man hates to reveal himself so lets his objects do the work.
The arch of a marble cabinet or the silhouette of a “Jarre” table which seems to be there “ad vitam aeternam” evoke a childhood spent in Poitou of the Romanesque churches.
He began as a self-taught artist who welded alone all of his first pieces: his urban, barbarian and rock’n’roll period punctuated by the throbbing beat of his sledge hammer.
When Schmitt decides to chip away all ornaments, he does it through the lens of balance or apparent loss of balance, with tables and consoles in folded bronze or associated with materials which contrast with the rigidity of the metal. But then he can’t resist a curve. Utopian with a vision he seeks relentlessly for his own vocabulary of shapes.
The forest of Fontainebleau overflowing in his workshop inspires organic free pieces. A symbolized nature that one finds in the series of tree stumps and bronze rocks. And then always, the chiaroscuro, the light and the density, the fusing of the past and future.
As Cocteau said: “all which is fashionable goes out of fashion” and it is always presumptuous to say of anything it is “timeless”, but Eric Schmitt’s objects aim for this distinction because they are almost indestructible… relics of a civilization still to be invented.
