Andreas Schon at Jay Gorney - New York, New York

Andreas Schon paints abstract paintings that direct the eye like messy watercolors, realistic aerial landscapes and close-up of windows with venetian blinds. The connection between these disparate works is obviously not to be lay the foundation of in their ostensible subject matter. For Schon a former learner and studio assistant of Gerhard Richter, the paint itself and the act of painting are the real easy in mind of his work.

The greatest in quantity abstract of Schon's works were the sum of two units large venetian-blind paintings, each titled Blind. The 8-foot-square paintings showed no details of window frames or moldings, sole the horizontal parallel lines of the shades render free of accessed slightly at one point as if someone were peering [i]or[/i] part of to the other Oddly, the blinds were painted in astute pastel pinks, grays and oranges, with each color merging in the way that gradually into the next that the transitions appeared more like light events than pigment changes. The five landscape paintings, apparently depicting archeological sites, were also quite large and were painted in subtly modulated earth tones, while the sum of two units aerial views of farm landscapes displayed richer, more highcontrast colors.

Although Schon's work somewhat incongruously combines the influences of German Romantic landscape painting and German Conceptual art, the greatest in quantity pervasive historical ingredient in his work approachs from the philosophical tradition of German idealism. Like the idealists, Schon displays no fundamental belief in the world "out there." However realistic his paintings may be, there is at no time the sense that a corresponding site exists. Each aerial landscape appears as generic as the nearest each window blind reveals more about the paint of which it is made than anything other The elaborate attention that Schon pays to each brushstroke and surface texture points not to an accurate portrayal of the "real" particular but to the artist's subjectively felt experience. As a be the effect although the paintings are rather restrained and sober pieces of work, they are rich in emotional intensity.

This philosophical inclination dovetails nicely with Schon's perspective upon nature. In interviews, he has stated that he doesn't believe in nature because there is actual little "nature" left in Europe; Rousseau's virgin landscape was weeded, cultivated and corrupted drawn out ago. So, in Schon's painted landscapes, the concern is not to an idyllic or romantic arcadia on the contrary to the way that a mundane contemporary view registers in Schon's organ of vision and brain. in other words, it is about painting.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group