Bob van Orsouw

Albrecht Schnider: Wieder Finden
19 November 2011 – 4 February 2012
Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich

Press release

When is a picture plane open or closed? When does it offer you room for imagining fullness and vacancy, formulation and happenstance that we define as a picture or as ‘pictureness’? Albert Schnider (*1958 in Lucerne) pursues these fundamental questions in his paintings and drawings and formulates—besides the abstraction of the possible and the manifold—also the longing he/we have for the pictorial.
In the beginning is the drawing, which in many respects is essential to Albrecht Schnider, for the fragile form drawn by hand produces lines and planes that configure the constructive basis for the (future) painting. In the drawing, moreover, the intent behind the precise, the volitional, the incalculable, the happenstance and, finally, what diverges from the determined design, comes together in a very direct way. Even if Albrecht Schnider’s geometric motifs seem in their form to be exactly calculated, they proceed from an intuitive quest. In his decision-making process, Schnider weighs the different possibilities of graphically drawn figurations until, between the single planes and lines, the (for the artist) sole possible formal figuration gets defined. Based on the result, Schnider specifies which portions of the plane are provided with which colour values and which left blank. In this artistic process, the undefined and the definable stand together and make one thing above all explicit: namely, the antithetical longing to want to achieve what is unachievable—because neither homogeneity nor multiplicity can exist as a whole.
This thought can be retraced in a closer inspection of the painting. The sheared-off geometric motifs are imaginable as figurations and fragments of a lost-sight-of whole. The fields provided with a colour value or left blank are planes and volumes, depths and vacancies. The geometric motifs are three-dimensional figures or splintered planes in space. The metal colours are ephemeral reflecting screens for the light and stand vis-à-vis the definition of black and white. In this double-entendre of visual and mental interplay we as viewers implement the construction of a now possible, realised picture. For each reality of the pictorial that Albrecht Schnider seeks in his painted formulations and, in the end, encompasses, takes place when the viewer, by means of the defined and the undefined and what is on hand, thinks of what is missing. It is in this antithesis that the available construction and the absence of the pictorial come together to a reality in realisation.

At Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Albrecht Schnider is showing his current paintings of geometric motifs. The exhibition includes small-scale and two very large-scale formats. In Schnider’s many-faceted paintings, drawings and object-oriented works, the formulation with geometric figurations is aligned with the thematic contents of his other subjects.

Birgit Szepanski
From the German by Jeanne Haunschild