Andreas Schon at Jay Gorney - New York, New York

Art in America, March, 1993 by Dena Shottenkirk

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

The most abstract of Schon's works were the two large venetian-blind paintings, each titled Blind. The 8-foot-square paintings showed no details of window frames or moldings, only the horizontal parallel lines of the shades opened slightly at one point as if someone were peering through. Oddly, the blinds were painted in subtle pastel pinks, grays and oranges, with each color merging so gradually into the next that the transitions appeared more like light effects 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 two 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 most pervasive historical ingredient in his work comes from the philosophical tradition of German idealism. Like the idealists, Schon shows no fundamental belief in the world "out there." However realistic his paintings may be, there is never the sense that a corresponding site exists. Each aerial landscape appears as generic as the next, each window blind reveals more about the paint of which it is made than anything else. The elaborate attention that Schon pays to every brushstroke and surface texture points not to an accurate portrayal of the "real" object, but to the artist's subjectively felt experience. As a result, 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 on nature. In interviews, he has stated that he doesn't believe in nature because there is very little "nature" left in Europe; Rousseau's virgin landscape was weeded, cultivated and corrupted long ago. So, in Schon's painted landscapes, the reference is not to an idyllic or romantic arcadia but to the way that a mundane contemporary view registers in Schon's eye and brain. in other words, it is about painting.