Albrecht Schnider: Recent Paintings

Albrecht Schnider’s sixth solo exhibition with Galerie Thomas Schulte presents large-scale sprayed acrylic lacquer paintings alongside a selection of new works on raw canvas—contrasting textured and smooth surfaces and materializing shifts in the figure-ground relationship. In the interplay between images, what comes to the fore is the scope of constructive possibilities in Schnider’s work, emerging in parallel to the constancy of his distinctive visual language. Through processes of both intuition and analysis, Schnider constructs constellations of color fields that materialize images in a state of continual becoming. Forms and planes hover before our eyes, before the surface of the canvas, occupying a space entirely their own.

Schnider’s precise, abstract paintings objects take as their source the delicate explorations of shifting planes and geometric forms found in the artist’s drawings. Though the artist’s paintings demonstrate a restrained elegance, their source drawings, swiftly sketched at the end of each day in the studio, are products of a spontaneous, intuitive process. While many of these drawings simply remain exercises, never emerging from their sketchbook, others are singled out by the artist for further exploration. From these drawings, oppositions of line and surface, presence and absence, are distilled and translated into the larger, more rigid compositions of Schnider’s paintings. The contiguity and overlap of these planes of colour and negative space toy with our sense of perception, leading us to question whether we are gazing at shattered parts of a fragmented whole or the layers and voids of a three-dimensional pictorial window.

The forms that emerge in Schnider’s images are in constant tension—between their own agency and the specificity with which they have manifested. Though they are decisively generated, firmly fixed within their own boundaries, they are nonetheless prone to shifts, transformation. Cut-out patterns alternate between positive and negative space; and even in their hard-edged abstraction, the forms take on an organic quality, forming calligraphic loops that flow from one movement to the next.

Albrecht Schnider's images on metallic backgrounds dissolve associations with objects, becoming pattern-like—emphatically two-dimensional. Frame-filling forms float in the center of the canvases. They are mostly rounded, bulbous—with either black or deep purple around their outermost edges, filled with alternating white and different color sections on the inside. There seems to be more going on in them—more interplays, contrasts and warpings.

In these sprayed lacquer paintings, the image reaches another level of anonymity, through smooth, seamless surfaces. In juxtaposition with the works on raw canvas, they introduce another contrast: the shift from smooth metallic background to raw, organic canvas. In the process, the materiality—and the constructedness—of both becomes more clearly articulated. The image is present, beyond what is immediately visible or recognizable, even when it eludes us.