Look, See

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