FRANKFURT.- Jan Schmidt’s artistic practice focuses on processes in which material, action, time, and chance are interwoven. His works emerge from clearly defined interventions–sawing, throwing, repeating–that leave traces behind. A work appears in Schmidt’s practice as a constellation of relationships: between raw material and intervention, between movement and resistance, between planning and the material’s response.

In Dust and Pieces, these considerations condense into a spatial constellation. At the center of the exhibition is a wall installation of saw drawings. Schmidt saws into a block of steel. The resulting filings fall onto a sheet of moistened handmade paper. After 48 hours in a climate chamber with high humidity, the filings bond with the paper. Each cut produces a drawing. The block moves successively from left to right across the sheets. Two hundred and forty-eight sheets bear the traces of this process as an inscription of time, force, and material behavior. In their serial arrangement, repetition and variation become legible, opening up a mode of perception in which even the smallest differences gain weight.

The exhibition unfolds across two rooms connected by the working process itself. In the rear room, the sawn pieces of marble, wood, bronze, and steel are laid out on a large table. They form the material point of departure for the work. In the front room, the dust from these pieces is presented in glass cylinders, arranged in a row on a console. This spatial juxtaposition of material and trace renders the structure of the work tangible: the material appears in its physical presence, the dust as the concentrated consequence of the same intervention. Both are equal components of a process that becomes comprehensible through observation. At the same time, they are relics of expansive installations, carrying their histories within them.

The new throw drawings also follow this line of thinking. A clearly defined movement sets a process in motion, the outcome of which emerges from the interplay of action, gravity, and material. The moment when small pieces of graphite strike the paper remains as a trace, extending the constellation of action and reaction.

Dust and Pieces invites viewers to direct their attention toward the emergence of form. Meaning arises from duration, from repetition, and from the traces that time and action leave within material.