• 1998 - 2003 Artist Window
• 2001 Jahrbuch Schweizer Gegenwartskünstler
• 2001 Art Profil, Dezember
• 2003 Pepperoni Kunstmagazin Nr.5
• 2004 Ostschweizer Spiegel für Charisma
• 2004 ProArts Kunstzeitung, 10
• 2000 Kunstkatalog „art-project“ Vereinte Kunst gegen Not
• 2006 Futuro 11/12
• 2006 Artwerk "Atelier Ansichten"
• 2007 Welcoming from  Roland Viotti, Gallery Jung, Seoul
• 2007 Gallery Beck, Homburg/Saar
• 2008 Dizionario Enciclopedico Int. d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Case editrice Alba
• 2009 Kunstforum International, Del Mese Fischer Verlag
• 2009 10-countries Exchange Exhibition of Art Professor, Seoul
• 2010 Bestes Handwerk St. Gallen und Umgebung ISBN:976-3-86528-491-4
  
  

Exhibition Gallery JUNG, Seoul, Korea 24.5. to 20.6.2007 - Welcoming from  Roland Viotti, Counceller of Swiss Embassy Seoul
Welcoming…It gives me great pleasure to extend the Swiss ambassador’s greetings in occasion of Swiss artist Johanna Schneider’s first appearance in Korea. Galler JUNG offered this great opportunity to JOHannaS – as she modestly wishes to be called – opening another Asian window to two European contemporary artists: JohannaS and Hardy a highly creative Austrian artist with strong links to South America, for the first time in Korea as well. Real life – dream, fictions and facts – an uninterrupted composition of mostly strong colours reflecting her state of mind and her moods. An overwhelming amalgamate of materials from acrylic to varnish and sand on paper to pigment on cardboard or even leather, oil chalk or canvas: JOHannaS is a splendid virtuoso in the kingdom of colours and an accomplished master in combining the richness of optical elements. Creating her most intimate feelings in colours, JohannaS opens her real dream-world, without restrictions to the beholder’s interpretation. Her enchanting – or should I say: bewitching way – of “making dreams real” – and realities dreamlike may captivate all your senses.

Let me conclude with my thanks to Jung Gallery for giving us the opportunity to enjoy a symphony in colours by JohannaS and Hardy in Seoul.

Thank you.Roland Viotti (Counsellor of Swiss Embassy)

FUTURO contemporaryart (artgate international)11-12/2006
JOHANNA S, BETWEEN IMAGINATION AND OTHERNESS
Slowly everything is created./Creation lasts forever./Darkness becomes light and light fire,/And humanity one day awoke and said:/I want … (from: Be Impatient! by Inger Hagerup).

These lines by the Norwegian poetess come to mind when one observes the entire œuvre of paintings by the artist JoHannaS.

This Swiss artist, whose poetic creed is underscored in the assertion that “all is illusion and imagination”, possesses an authentic, vigorous creative will which manifests itself through a measured formal “nomadism”. Her drive, in fact, is strong, to scour, to “probe”, to leaf through different formal, cultural and social realms. Johanna S is able to summarise the history of twentieth-century art when, with expressive mastery, she ranges across the most significant artistic currents of the last century: expressionism, abstractionism, nonrepresentational and conceptual art.

This capacity for expressive synthesis does not entail a choice on her part that brings to mind totally novel solutions claiming to be historic firsts, yet it is the clear sign of her inclination to exercise her mental “nomadism”, her need to explore the intimate demands of imagination and otherness; all of the interior continents that host the motivations and absolute drives towards the creative act. In her, perhaps, there is not the expectation of “absolute fire”, the spasmodic search for the “never seen”, yet there is the consciousness that it is possible to construct one’s own expressive cipher by “crossing” known formal territories with skill and curiosity. Intelligent and intuitive, excitable and sensitive, the artist fills her tales with sentimental tensions, between a renewed neofigurativism and a personal postformal style. In her “a-iconic”, “matteric” and dizzyingly dynamic compositions, an allusion to known forms predominates, and everything becomes precarious and illusive. In the first instance, the works of Johanna S leave us awaiting an indefinite time, an event. Not, to be sure, as a result of their compositional quality or content, but due to the expressive eclecticism that animates them, to the point where it becomes an arduous task to pinpoint the dominant language.

The fact that the painter combines poetic texts with her painted works or uses material or natural elements shows her sensitivity to “contaminations”, silent citations. So, in her case too, we might speak of languages that feed, in a structural manner, off of other languages and complex compositional structures. Languages that never present themselves in an independent form (only painting, only collage, only writing, and so on), to be considered the only expressive form of the artist. And, perhaps, by knowing the woman well, before the artist, we might be able to understand and complete her many-sided creative vision, we might identify the karstic vein of the impetuous river that feeds her work continuously.

It is a figuration that harks back to Heraclitus, yet one which we cannot avoid if we wish to highlight the force (engine) that moves her creativity. Engine and river: two symbols that take part in that becoming, that imaginative “creation”, through other languages, of other spaces of the mind, other demands of her interior “melancholy”. Most of the works by Johanna S known to us are characterised more by a systematic organisation of her own ideas than by an explosion of ideas. The artist goes on in her search in the certainty that Time (a large component of her work) can mitigate the impetuosity of her wanting to say everything in the most intense, immediate way possible. In it one reads the impetuosity that is the hallmark of the eternally “youthful” person, who finds, in her almost infantile unawareness, the need to free her own individuality to affirm a vague need of identity. Her work thus takes on definition and substance, more on the strictly linguistic level than on the existential, and offers itself as an interpretation of a reality with which the artist has always dialogued and against which she has chosen to measure herself. In the works presented, and seen, at ART Karlsruhe, Johanna S continues her artistic interpretation by reaffirming, with mosaic-like modulations, her instinctive-emotional vein with mixed techniques and in which the firings-up of colour display themselves in all their power of evocation. Her new cycle, “Digital Art Painting”, confirms the idea we have of the Swiss artist. A creative “cyclone” that continually needs to prove and make even clearer its own nomadism, the passages to which it is intimately tied and which are never completely unveiled. The colour, the magmatic force from which it is born, is more boldly delineated and the whole gamut of techniques to which the artist has recourse to broaden the process of elaboration show that she is familiar with and practices all of the linguistic keys that she needs to express herself and dialogue with us. Through these works the artist pursues, using a skilful melody of timbres, the creation of lyrical spaces to which she anchors her inner experiences and in which she shows us the opportunity for our own imaginative driftings: between dream and “disorientation”.

Furthermore, they are works which joyously lend themselves to compositions in progress, with which to write a variety of chromatic phrases in which each careful, sensitive observer can define his or her own infinite imaginations, uproot and expel timidity to embark on new adventures, new epiphanies. In these latest works, the artist sums up a long expressive “labour” consisting of careful research into and use of painting material and with which she lays bare the force of colour in setting out to explore new compositional territories. The creative “journey” of the artist, in order to be authentic and to fascinate, must be exhaustible and curious, skilful and wondrous, drenched in a lived, vitalising reality, at the crossroads between dream and hallucination, of “illness” and intoxicating will. All qualities given substance by Johanna S who represents an artistic voice of great importance and about whom we might – with due deference in the comparison – repeat what the poet Apollinaire wrote about Matisse in 1909: This wild man is a refined man.
Pino Bonanno