Thomas Scheibitz

Marc Jancou Fine Art, New York

Realism is merely a point of departure for Thomas Scheibitz who, in Kromp from 1997, oscillates between form and abstraction with a layered interplay of bold colours and angular structures. Consciously distancing itself from echoes of the German Romantic tradition, Scheibitz’s painting presents us with an image of our modern landscape that winks at the endless proliferation and manipulation of the digital, virtual and electronic image. Inhabiting a dreamlike space between the recognizable and the imagined, Scheibitz here evokes the speed and complexity of our technology and media-saturated contemporary culture through the ethereal washes of paint which both veil and nurture the depth of the image. Unlike the natural landscapes of his Romantic forefathers, such as Casper David Friedrich, Scheibitz’s landscape depicts a synthetic world as conveyed through television, film, magazine and advertising: designed, redesigned, packaged, pixilated and tinted – visual equivalents of genetic modification.

Using paint as a means of visual compression, Scheibitz dismantles the fabric of existence into compartmentalized units of overlapping colour. Hailing from the Dresden Academy and inspired by its weight of painterly tradition from Friedrich to Gerhard Richter, Schiebitz’s work reaffirms the validity of oil painting as a pertinent medium with which to communicate the transience and complexity of contemporary experience. Breaking down the image in a manner that is at once representational and transcendent, Scheibitz insinuates at fragmentary landscapes, architectural structures and flowers in a graphic-like reduction of form. Never revealing too much, the spaces within spaces and myriad geometric shapes in Kromp are at once obdurate and ephemeral, spacious and solid. Using both the conceptual incongruity and spatial possibilities of these abutted forms, he jams his chosen elements together into a flat plane according to the aesthetic of collage.

With its smooth handling, subtly discordant palette and occasional anarchic drip, the painterly complexity of the surface captivates the eye and yet does not permit the viewer to enter in. Delighting in the malleability and viscosity of the oils to sculpt and differentiate form, Scheibitz’s work fuses elements of the figurative, cubist and colourist traditions with the pixilation of our disparate and speeding visual environment.