In Sara Badr Schmidt’s world, there are skies, lots of skies, beautiful skies that she holds out to us like so many questions. They sometimes carry words, nestled in their own deep blue, or they are streaked with clouds that undoubtedly veil secrets. These are travelling skies, captured in Beirut, Stockholm, Paris, or elsewhere, overlooking invisible and impalpable worlds. They seem light. They are serious, heavy with our ignorance, our hopes, perhaps our sufferings. Under some of these skies, there are ruins, bodies that weep ;one hears cries, dull blows, the whistling of bombs, followed by that threatening silence that does not speak of peace but of the anguish of waiting. Under others, there is a child with salty skin dancing on a beach, splashing joyfully, carefree little humans wriggling, insignificant and poignant.
When she photographs, paints, weaves a sky, Sara does not show us all these ghosts, neither the good nor the bad. But they are there. We feel them.
All skies are similar, all skies are different. We would so like them to be the same, as a universal answer, we would so like to live under the same sky… But isn’t that the most naive of our illusions? Sara, an essential artist, that is someone who digs close to the soul to express the inexpressible, seeks her own skies, those of childhood, those of innocence, those she has lost and that continue to haunt her. When she was little, she had two skies, two countries, two houses now destroyed, two cultures, two hearts that sometimes beat out of sync. She would go from one to the other, from the light of Lebanon where her family was rooted, to the Sweden of vacations where she welcomed squirrels in the drizzle and befriended snails.
She traveled like a migratory bird, seeking balance, resting on a current of air, reassuring herself with the idea that there she would find peace, forgetting that once one of her homes was found, the other, immediately, would be missed. The madness of men has disrupted this precarious balance.
Look at this faceless little girl, doll in hand, sheltering under the dining room table. It’s the image, so frail, so powerful, of «war,» this thing that, Sara says, sometimes falls silent but always leaves a taste of mold inside. It’s the image of fear, which we don’t want to admit, which we try to suppress, but which embeds itself in the depths of cells like a virus ready to awaken. It’s the image of lasting trauma that overwhelms so many children under so many skies, but against which the little girl, one day, rebelled. She is seven years old, she has matured, and she discovers that, if Santa Claus does not exist, fear does exist, for adults too. Major revelation: she suddenly understands that such is the nature of men. That borders are first erected in minds. That beautiful ideas and generous words don’t do much there. That, on the path to humanity, every generation must always start over. She attains this ultimate lucidity without which there is no possible freedom: the awareness of the tragic.
Art is the only answer to this new state of mind, the only path to transcendence, the only quest for truth. My friend Sara, now a woman, will devote herself entirely to it, diving into colors and materials as into the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Look at this graceful cherry tree with its unreal hue exploding like a sunset, this enchanting pink, a rebellious color that dared to break away from red, symbol of blood and fire, to affirm tenderness and femininity. Is it a coincidence if this work of revolt is a call to sweetness and sensuality? Is it surprising that it is a tree? A tree has roots.
What better to oppose to the pain of exile? This is precisely what Sara Badr Schmidt tells us in her so sensitive works: we need skies as much as we need roots. It would be wrong to think that our anchor and our inheritances pin us to the ground and constrain us to immobility. It’s the opposite: our roots allow us to soar towards the sky. They are our landmarks when we take height. The little human needs two legs to walk: the individual and the universal.
Exiles are uprooted trees, lifted by arbitrary and often malevolent winds, floating with a feeling of a lack like a hole in the heart. But they also carry within them fragments of life, a place, smells, flavors, tunes of music, a mother’s caress, a father’s words, a friend’s smile, a first kiss. The suitcase is more or less heavy, depending on the weight of loss, grief, and pain. But sooner or later, it must be set down, an attempt to take root elsewhere. We are all forced to resign ourselves to it. Having become a woman, little Sara turned her nostalgia into works of art. She rebuilds her dreams and her homes with drawings, woolen pictures, painted canvases, mixing textiles, clay, bronze, concrete… We would like to travel in her landscapes, snuggle into her fabrics, absorb their secret softness, rediscover the salt of the sea, the warmth of childhood, the illusion of fetal tranquility. By some magic of the artist, her works are not sad. They speak to us of joy, innocence, and hope too.
Sara Badr Schmidt’s art is a quest for the sensitive and the flesh that goes very far into the depths of our souls. To surrender to it is a chance and a liberation. And there we can find beauty, that mysterious thing that exists only in our gaze and in our emotion.