David Schnell’s Perspective | Made to Order
A lot of paintings feel as if they’re more about nostalgia than about the world today. Leipziger David Schnell, however, seems to build links between painting’s past and culture’s present.
His large-scale landscapes, on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center as part of its show of New Leipzig School paintings, are built around extreme perspective views. They portray the land rushing away toward a remote vanishing point, like the tiled floor in a Renaissance altarpiece. Everything that sits above Schnell’s ground seems boxed and built for easy perspective calculation: Hay bales are rectangular solids with the barest overlay of dry-grass texture; the leaves of trees float free as identical and regular ovoids. Every form is chosen for its easy disposition and rotation through Schnell’s manufactured, calculated space. Even his shadows look too crisp to be true
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