DAVID SCHNELL by Clifford Elgin

The artist David Schnell is a member of a very distinct German group of painters that has emerged onto the world scene over the last five years. Schnell’s paintings were at first very reminiscent of Neo Rauch’s work. Both artists used perspective, color, and a sense of place that is jarring upon first viewing. However differences between the two artists become apparent as you take a close look at their individual bodies of work.

Rauch is a controversial painter. His colors are dulled down grays. In most of his canvases you are confronted by more than one perspective. Buildings seem to recede into the distance in one direction while not correlating with the horizon line. This illusion gives the work a quality of being either a ‘dream-space’ or unfolding in a De Chirico/ Kafka-esq otherworld. Rauch started his painting studies in East Germany. The old Soviet hero worker motif is a constant in his work. From one painting to the next, Rauch uses a 1950’s style figure, in a state of deportment somewhat at odds to what they are doing, but none the less obviously undertaking some sort of mysterious candid physical activity. Often, at close inspection, the paintings are sloppy in a way that is curiously difficult to discern whether or not it was applied in such a manner intentionally or not.

Schnell obviously had Rauch at the back of his mind while producing a breakout series of paintings that toured the gallery circuit in 2002. His work immediately evokes Rauch through both a similar color palette as well as their sense of place. Only instead of using the figure, Schnell most often hands the viewer a landscape that is both bleak and empty. Strange objects often make it feel as though the viewer were looking either at what might be an everyday scene in the distant future or visions, like Rauch, of hallucinatory dreams.

Schnell’s paintings are very much in your face and direct. The one point perspective and the application of paint is naïve and childishly constructed compositionally. But for all of their faults, there is still something that will haunt the viewer, and thus force that person to consider them more carefully. Beyond the influence of Rauch, Schnell’s paintings evoke work done by naïve and institutionally insane.

Schnell is still growing as an artist, and it will be interesting to see if he conquers his current troubles. His last two large shows at Eigen+Art were disasters in every respect. In an effort to distance himself from Rauch, Schnell produced some of the most painfully bad art ever conceived. While still situating himself in faux landscapes, Schnell became fixated with long narrow sheds that played up his fascination with one-point perspectives. These sheds then devolved into abstract shapes that clashed with the flat scenes of nature surrounding them. The painting mannerisms used on these canvases are blatantly crude (though in the same manner as Rauch and other Leipzig artists which makes one wonder if this is a purposeful ‘style’ that these artists are evoking). All in all, its difficult to think of an artist outside of some of New York’s 1980’s heavy hitters (Schnabel, Salle…) who revel in being so blatantly bad.

In closing on Schnell… it is apparent that what he has been producing lately is terrible. But the promise of his earlier work of just a few years ago leads one to have some hope he might be able to pull off a transition into a mature stage of his career.

Schnell, "Ufer" 2003

Rauch, 2005 "Abstraktion"

Rauch, "Weiter" 2005

Schnell, 2002 "Kollision in der Baurnschule"

Schnell, "Aussicht" 2005