When asked about the role of the paradise in his work, Erik Schmidt answers his interviewer Adriano Sack: “Trying to stage life as a paradise is an important motivator for me. Whenever I go somewhere, I feel this total fascination, even if it’s only a palm beach.” Erik Schmidt creates works that explore symbolic processes within various social systems. The immersion into foreign contexts plays an important role in his paintings, videos, photographs and drawings. Be it in the crowded cityscape of Tokyo, in the camps of the American Occupy movement, with wine and olive farmers in the West Bank, in aristocratic hunting circles of his North Rhine-Westphalian homeland, or under the umbrella of mighty palm trees – Schmidt is an observer and tends to deliberately assume the role of the outsider. This detached attitude provides him with insight into group dynamic processes, but also allows him to unravel a wide variety of cliché s, stereotypes, codes, rituals, norms, patterns, and conventions. And at the end of a long series of works there are now palm trees: “They are square and in the middle is the nut.”