David Schnell

Breathing new life into the conventions of the landscape genre, Pilze creates a skilled interplay between the rigid rules of classical painting and a rigorously contemporary iconography. Hailing from West Germany, David Schnell is one of a select few who chose to study in the recently reunified Eastern bloc, attracted to the venerable Art Academy of Leipzig by the traditional grounding in the disciplines of life drawing, analysis of composition and painterly perspective on which the school staked its reputation.

It is this last quality that has become a leitmotif of Schnell’s oeuvre. He is fascinated by the Renaissance discovery of single point perspective and the vanishing point which inspires his own paintings which are not so much naturalistic landscapes as exercises in linear perspective. This technique typically necessitates a low vantage point and in Pilze this is taken to such an extreme that even the mushrooms, from which the German title Pilze is drawn, appear to be looming high over the viewer. Behind the mushrooms strict pictorial order is formed by a near symmetrical arrangement of trees as well as six narrow black lines which stretch towards the horizon. Where the conscientious landscape painter traditionally would have painted over these lines that serve as a guiding device, Schnell leaves them visible as abstract forms that hammer home the thrillingly steep recession of the picture plane. This three-dimensional effect is further emphasised in the present work by the elongated vertical format of the canvas and the dark and stormy sky which bears down on the horizon line, filling the top three quarters of the composition. In laying bare the underlying structure of his work, Schnell allows the viewer to partake in his exploration of matters of representation.

The impact of Schnell’s perspective is to monumentalise the mushrooms and trees of the middle foreground. This inevitably references the great master of the German Romantic landscape tradition, Casper David Friedrich, himself native to the Eastern region of Germany and an important role model for the Leipzig painters. Friedrich used the motif of the indigenous German forests and the scale of nature to dwarf the human presence in his art. In a thoroughly contemporary twist on this tradition-steeped genre, Schnell uses the technicalities of perspective to put the viewers themselves in that position, guiding one’s gaze upwards to the huge expanse of the heavens above. While for Friedrich nature was supreme, in Schnell there is a schematised, man-made feel to this overly ordered universe, a sensation which is accentuated by the suggested form of an overpass which sweeps diagonally across the horizon line to the left. Rather than subverting tradition, Schnell reinvents an almost obsolete genre and makes it pertinent to the twenty-first-century discourse on painting.