Look, See

Zen Arcade, Side 1

Zen Arcade, Side 1, 2004, HTML, 594 x 575 pixels

Black/Red 1-32

Black/Red 1-32, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each (view HTML version, 202 kb)

Black/Red 31 & 32

Black/Red 31 & 32, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Black/Red 29 & 30

Black/Red 29 & 30, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Black/Red 27 & 28

Black/Red 27 & 28, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Black/Red 25 & 26

Black/Red 25 & 26, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Black/Red 23 & 24

Black/Red 23 & 24, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Black/Red 21 & 22

Black/Red 21 & 22, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Blue & Green 4-6

Blue & Green 4-6, 2004, pastel and water on paper, 12 x 9" each (scanned)

1-3 in this series posted 20041121.

Black/Red 19 & 20

Black/Red 19 & 20, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Blue & Green 1-3

Blue & Green 1-3, 2004, pastel and water on paper, 12 x 9" each (scanned)

Returning to the blue and green palette, working through some ideas from HTML drawings, getting ready for painting a small series of panels, thinking about how, in paint, I might handle overlay, tranparency, and the figure/object vs. the field.

Black/Red 17 & 18

Black/Red 17 & 18, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Black/Red 15 & 16

Black/Red 15 & 16, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Black/Red 13 & 14

Black/Red 13 & 14, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

NY MoMA installation views

My work installed at inserted into the new MoMA, opening tomorrow (gallery views liberally borrowed from NYT)

Black/Red 11 & 12

Black/Red 11 & 12, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Black/Red 9 & 10

Red/Black 9 & 10, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Tom Moody writes...

Tom Moody posted an HTML drawing and writes, "A CD-ROM was recently published of the HTML drawings that appear daily on the blog. I continue to be intrigued and impressed with Ashley's use of the weblog as a medium for abstract art made in the same language as the medium. It's transparency in every good sense of the word."

Thanks, Tom.

Black/Red 7 & 8

Red/Black 7 & 8, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels each

Black/Red 5 & 6

Red/Black 5 & 6, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels

Black/Red 3 & 4

Red/Black 3 & 4, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels

Black/Red 1 & 2

Red/Black 1 & 2, 2004, HTML, 240 x 200 pixels

Untitled 1-11 (Tu Fu, translated by Rexroth)

Untitled 1-11 (Tu Fu, translated by Rexroth), 2004, HTML, dimensions variable (see HTML with poems)

Untitled (Deep in the Mountain Wilderness)

Untitled (Deep in the Mountain Wilderness), 2004, HTML, 345 x 605 pixels

Untitled (Moon Festival)

Untitled (Moon Festival), 2004, HTML, 345 x 605 pixels

Untitled (Clear Evening After Rain)

Untitled (Clear Evening After Rain), 2004, HTML, 365 x 550 pixels

Untitled (Jade Flower Palace)

Untitled (Jade Flower Palace), 2004, HTML, 358 x 528 pixels

Richard Schur's Paintings: Stacked, Packed, and Whacked

This is a revision of the essay originally posted 20041104. This version will be in a book produced for an exhibition of western abstract painting opening at Canton Museum in Guang Zhou in spring 2005, which then travels to Duo Run Museum, Shanghai; Hu Bei Kunstakademie, Academy Gallery, Wu Han; and White Space Gallery, Bejing

Update 20041129: this essay is now published at richard-schur.de.

Wobbly colored blocks; bleeding edges; overlapping sheets of brilliant acrylic; barely aligned grids; out-of-square rectangles divided and abutted to create a mosaic of spaces: German artist Richard Schur's recent paintings are intense abstractions packed with quirky tensions and odd pleasures, a range of associations, and honest nods to history.

The stretcher's edges are practically the only right angles in these paintings. Although Schur uses tape to draw rectangular areas in each painting there are no straight and crisp lines; he tapes by eye, free-hand, and the paint bleeds and fuzzes out beneath the taped edges. Schur uses a normally precise tool to craft handmade objects, which gives the paintings a human scale and texture, and a kind of softness one finds, say, when comparing an adobe building to one of factory-made bricks.

The painting's awkward, misaligned rectangles join and separate into different spaces, places, or bodies: an old sagging building; a wacky carnival; a fractal that has forgotten its inherited pattern; a cancer rapidly running amuck; fluttering prayer flags; or an object that appears alternately distant and close.

The densest grids in the most recent paintings form jerky, warped, pulsing fields. Trace your eyes over these grids: What is pushing on the painting from behind? What unseen force pushes in on the front of the painting? What surrounds the painting, putting pressure on all the shapes inside it, bending or compressing them, making them jam up against each other and shift? Looking at these paintings I instantly think of walls, children's blocks, quilts, and maps. These densely packed rectangles make me think of cut stones tightly stacked in the Great Wall, Machu Picchu, and the Wailing Wall. I think of high stacks of children's colored wood blocks momentarily still just before collapsing and scattering across the floor. I am reminded of the quilts by the African-American women of Gee's Bend, Alabama, and of Japanese Buddhist Kesa robes which are made from discarded fabric into the brick-like pattern of rice fields as a devotional act. Aerial maps are an easy association, but in my version I am looking down on vast farmlands where the harvest consists of jelly beans, gummi bears, and chocolate bars.

Schur's paintings make me wonder how Piet Mondrian (Netherlands, 1872-1944) might paint after a drunken afternoon with Shitao (China, 1642-1707). I think of how Concrete artist Richard Lohse (Switzerland, 1902-1988) might shift his forms and color after a week of doodling surrounded by Giotto's frescoes (Italy, 1267-1337) in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Just for fun, I imagine Sol Lewitt (US, 1928) borrowing color and space from Indian miniatures, and just to be ridiculous, I think of Barnett Newman's (US, 1905-1970)and Andy Warhol's (US, 1928-1987) love child attending a Montessori School with Paul Klee (Switzerland, 1879-1940) reproductions hanging in the cafeteria . Silly, maybe, but the colors, forms, and spaces evoked by the image of these scenarios perhaps get a bit at the wonderful things that Richard Schur's paintings can do.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, California
Novermber 2004

Top right: Untitled (91), 2004, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 180 cm
Bottom left: Untitled (93), 2004, acrylic on cotton, 41 x 36 cm

Untitled (Clear After Rain)

Untitled (Clear After Rain), HTML, 330 x 490 pixels

Untitled (A Restless Night in Camp)

Untitled (A Restless Night in Camp), 2004, HTML, 355 x 500 pixels

Van Gogh: Newly Mowed Lawn with Weeping Tree

Newly Mowed Lawn with Weeping Tree

Arles: 6-8 August 1888

(Houston, The Menil Collection)

F 1451, JH 1545

Untitled (Banquet at the Tso Family Manor)

Untitled (Banquet at the Tso Family Manor), 2004, HTML, 355 x 495 pixels

Untitled (Night Thoughts While Traveling)

Untitled (Night Thoughts While Traveling), 2004, HTML, 346 x 491 pixels

DRAFT: Richard Schur's Paintings

Wobbly blocks of color; bleeding edges; flat overlapping sheets of brilliant acrylic color; shapes jostling into barely aligned grids; out-of-square rectangles that divide and nudge against each other to create a mosaic of spaces: German artist Richard Schur’s recent paintings[1] are intense picture objects, abstractions packed with visual and intellectual hooks, both quirky tensions and odd pleasures, that generate complex structures, a range of associations, and honest nods to history. The paintings are, frankly, initially delightful decorative walls and signs, and apparently colorful veneers which are, when I use my eye to scratch the surface, much more than the merely bold abstractions that they may at first glance appear to be.

The only straight edges to be found in these paintings are at the edge of the stretcher; one of the first things to note is that all of the drawing in each painting is done with tape. However, instead of using tape to make nice straight and crisp lines, which are at least two obvious reasons for using it, Schur trumps these assumptions by throwing out rulers and straight edges to do free-hand taping, and by allowing paint to bleed and fuzz out beneath the taped edges. The practice of using a normally precise tool in order to craft handmade objects gives the paintings a human scale and a human texture, a kind of softness and posture one would notice when, say, comparing an adobe building to one of factory-made bricks.

Schur’s improvisatory practice of repeatedly taping and re-taping sections, painting new shapes over old, and rotating the canvas to find direction and defy visual gravity, leads to a complex accumulation of soft-edged rectangles in multiple colors. The blurry boundaries between rectangles, sometimes explicitly overlapping, invite and encourage the eye to move along and across the division between shapes to peer over and around corners into deep and shallow spaces. These spaces are further articulated by both color and paint quality— the intense color and evenly applied matte paint may at first reinforce a reading of flat space, and it is this material aspect that makes the painting a painted, even decorated object before it becomes a picture. But give the eye a moment and soon it is slipping into and out of rooms, windows, and alleys and confronting walls and closed doors, as if an extremely dense version of Hans Hofman’s push pull effect. Some paintings, usually the larger ones, have eventually noticeable sub-groupings of shapes; if you zoom your eyes out while looking at a painting, perhaps squints just a bit, areas of similar hue, tint, or shade appear, as if some aspect of a super-grid or a shadow hovers over the composition. Schur’s paintings are especially successful because of the way in which they are read as having multiple layers and kinds of flat and rhythmic spaces.

The painting’s skewed, misshapen, misaligned rectangles project different kinds of spaces, places, or bodies: a tumbledown, rustic town; a cancer rapidly running amuck, a whacky carnival, a fractal that has forgotten its inherited pattern, something seen as if either from a distance or close up. The grid in the most recent paintings is a jerky field of warped shapes and pulsing edges that is visually, physically, and emotionally experienced. Use your eyes to trace over the irregular grid in each painting: What is behind the painting pushing out towards you? What is in front of the painting, pushing in? What surrounds the painting, putting pressure on all the shapes inside the painting? What movement is shaking these rectangles, bending or compressing them?

When I look at these paintings I can’t help but think right away of walls, children’s blocks and games, quilts, maps, and fields. For example, these densely packed rectangles make me think of the variously shaped and sized stones tightly stacked into walls at Machu Picchu in the Andes, or the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. I also think of playing with colored wood blocks that have been stacked into towers, just to see how high they can go before losing balance and falling, scattering across the floor with a loud clacking sound, and also of board games, and the organization and community it takes to play the game. I am reminded of the recently exhibited and deservedly well-known quilts by the African-American women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and of Japanese Buddhist Kesa robes which are made as a devotional act from discarded fabric and use the brick-like pattern of rice fields. Aerial maps are an easy association, but in my version I am looking down on vast farmlands where the harvest consists of jelly beans, gummi bears, and chocolate bars.

Schur’s handling of scale is appropriate and confident. Scale, of course, isn’t about size, but is instead about the relationship of a painting’s drawing, color, and composition to the size of the canvas. For example, compare Untitled (91), (2004, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 180 cm)[2] (above) with Untitled (93), 2004, acrylic on cotton, 41 x 36 cm)[3] (left); while Untitled (91) is five times larger than Untitled (93), the components of each painting are specific to the size of the overall painting, comprising a successively integrated and holistic image and object in both cases.

Schur’s paintings make me wonder how Piet Mondrian would have painted after a few drunken lessons with Shih Tao (1642-1707). I think of how Swiss Concrete artist Richard Lohse (1902-1988) might soften his forms after a week doodling in the Scrovegni Chapel under Giotto’s frescoes. Just for fun, imagine Sol Lewitt borrowing color and space from Indian miniatures, and just to be ridiculous, think of Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol’s love child raised in a Montessori School with Klee reproductions. Silly, maybe, but the forms, colors, spaces, and practices evinced in these scenarios perhaps get a bit at the wonderful things that Richard Schur’s paintings can do.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, California, USA
November 2004

[1] http://www.richard-schur.de/
[2] http://www.richard-schur.de/91.htm
[3] http://www.richard-schur.de/93.htm

Richard Schur is Assistant to Prof. Jerry Zeniuk, Academy of Fine Arts Munich. His recent exhibitions include: 2004 "Frische Farbe!", Gallery Bodenseekreis, Meersburg; "munich school?", Kunstverein Aichach; "Und im Winde klirren die Fahnen"; Gallery Ben Kaufmann, Munich

Untitled (Stars and Moon on the River)

Untitled (Stars and Moon on the River), 2004, HTML, 335 x 447 pixels

Untitled (Full Moon)

Untitled (Full Moon), 2004, HTML, 313 x 382 pixels

Scraps 1-4

Scrap 1, 2004, ink and watercolor on paper, 8.5 x 16 cm (scanned)

Scrap 2, 2004, ink and watercolor on paper, 9 x 17.2 cm (scanned)

Scrap 3, 2004, ink and watercolor on paper, 8.8 x 20.5 cm (scanned)

Scrap 2, 2004, ink and watercolor on paper, 11 x 21.5 cm (scanned)

Wang Xizhi Watching Geese, about 1295 (sections 1, 2) Qian Xuan (ca. 1235?before 1307) Handscroll; ink and color on paper; 9 1/8 x 36 1/2 in. (23.2 x 92.7 cm) Ex coll.: C. C. Wang Family The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Gift of The Dillon Fund, 1973 (1973.120.6)

Untitled (Traveling Northward)

Untitled (Traveling Northward), 2004, HTML, 313 x 382 pixels