Look, See

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Untitled (Traveling Northward)

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

Trennung 1-24

 

 

Trennung, 2004, HTML, 198 x 162 pixels
Wir Fallen	Er Verschwand	Ich Flechte	Du Nennst
Sie Hängt	Es Bleibt	Sie Schmelzen	Sie Zögern
Er Teilt	Ich Schwanke	Sie Fegt	Wir Entgehen
Er Wartet	Wir Stolpern	Ihr Wundert	Ich Ziehe
Wir Flattern	Er Hammert	Wir Vermissen	Ihr Verblasst
			</