Agial Gallery – Beirut
March 2012
Our notions of landscape art are much too reasonable. We envision two planes, one above the other, divided horizontally. In our minds, the line of the plain, the sea or the mountain separating the air and the land represents a border. Landscape is thus understood as a matter of territory that the drawing defines by its contours and that the color connotes by its shades.
Sara Badr Schmidt reduces this genre to its widest common denominator: the sky. To create her series, Borderless, she simply photographed blue swaths of sky, pierced by undefinable profusions of clouds. The skies, which she captured during her travels, are printed on canvas and mounted in light boxes. The abstract forms of distant spheres are retranscribed into several languages — “Arrabbiata,” “Lagom,” “Hello” — simple terms that lend a context to these portraits of the skies. For Sara Badr Schmidt, each sky has its own vocabulary. “Mots-souvenirs” — keepsake words — thus caption the images, which are objective in their form. This landscape without borders is, even so, connected to one of the most powerful elements of territory: language. This balance between ideal form and word grants Borderless an unlimited power of suggestion. In concrete terms, the works are presented unframed, creating an aura, a halo, an atmosphere. more