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14/11/2008

Albrecht Schnider

Galerie Bob van Orsouw (old location), Zurich

This exhibition of recent works by Albrecht Schnider takes up where the 2006 retrospective at Aargauer Kunsthaus left off and, at the same time, composes a further high point in the artist’s collaboration with our gallery that has existed since 1989.

In Aargau’s museum retrospective, the diversity in Schnider’s artistic oeuvre was already very much in evidence. The landscape and portrait genres, the large compilation of drawings and the immense pictorial range, which includes figuration and abstraction, reflect the artist’s delight in testing new painting possibilities. As Schnider tells it, “most important” is what happens on the drawing paper. Drawing is synonymous with “inventing” and has the inborn spontaneous potential of getting down on paper, directly and roughly, that which will later be transferred onto canvas in a more concentrated and purer form. The impeccable and homogeneous application of paint on the latest lacquered paintings is very convincing. Through the use of the metallic colors of gold, silver and bronze, as well as through the strict lineation, the viewer is given the impression that the paintings have been industrially produced.

This meets the artist’s requirement that is hostile to “peinture” and that banishes from the canvas anything handcrafted, narrative or mannerist. Thus Schnider rejects any impasto paint application and the illusionist play of light and shadow. The pictorial programme aims for a purity that is limited to what you see. What is depicted is free from metaphysical speculation or empirical references. Even the landscape canvases painted in oil, on which the artist has continually worked since the beginning of his career, show no real motifs. Schnider produces “ideal landscapes” that he calls “models for landscapes”, i.e., “thoroughly placeless, artificial constructs”. Thus they do not reflect any subjective atmosphere or special light situation, but can be understood as the “mere” composition of color fields, as pure forms.

In contrast to the landscapes, white as a chromatic phenomenon is dominant in the figurative portraits and in the abstract pieces. Nevertheless, it must be said that the artist resists the common categorization into abstract and figurative. He considers this anachronistic and qualifies: “It doesn’t in the least matter if a picture is representational or abstract. It has really all become a great experimental field.” Schnider no longer feels himself aligned with an authoritative tradition, but is interested in the “loss” of this authority, even though his way of thinking and painting has been strongly moulded by this very art-historical tradition.

The “non-representational” paintings strike us as folded-out planes that have been painted beyond the picture edge. They seem inherently template-like and artificial. The precisely painted inside edges mutate between curve and strict right angle, generating kaleidoscopic structures. Also in the “abstract” paintings, as in the portraits, color areas are counterbalanced by white areas. Whereby the latter function as the genuine centre of the painting. Since, however, they are distributed across the entire picture plane, they simultaneously cancel out any kind of centring. The white turns into an actual vacancy, a nothingness, which the artist tries to make “pictorial” and thus tangible. But the nothingness, seems to stand less for a negation of the visible than for the infinity of space out of which every finite form originates.

Galerie Bob Van Orsouw
Limmatstrasse 270 - Zurich

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