Skilift

Always present in the paintings of Thomas Scheibitz are an element of cultural reference, and an element of abstraction. For this reason, there is a tendency to compare his work to Cubism; but whereas the Cubists painted fragmented pictures of their everyday reality, Scheibitz takes the already fragmented history of abstraction and injects banal, everyday content into it. The Cubists had simultaneously rendered multiple viewpoints of their surroundings in single images-- something that the new medium of photography could not do. In Scheibitz, by contrast, the manipulation is not of the everyday, but of the purity of abstract painting. He challenges the Abstract Expressionist vision that a universal plastic language could exist without divisive cultural associations. Instead, in his paintings we can find nothing that is not somehow a quote form somewhere else. Through his mundane palette, his alienated compositions, and the stock subject matter that he projects onto them, the artist weaves tired tapestries of recycled truths.

The source for this subject matter is an archive of media clippings the artist compiles. From this bone yard of snapshots, his painting becomes a means of exploring a network of cultural signifiers. However, his subjects are transformed beyond recognition, fragmented and elongated into uncanny familiarity. The abandoned architecture is always slightly derelict, yet monumental and expansive-- the vestiges of a once proud civilization. Their alienation from reality reflects the mediated reality of our media-saturated society. What interests Scheibitz is a kind of public memory, a collective storehouse of images, each of which attempt to capture and define the world we live in.

The present work is at once an image of oppressive perspective and of flatness. As the foreground recedes through a series of colorful paintchips into a grand Cezanne-esqe mountain, the eye wants to move backwards with it, drawn to the natural beauty. At the same time it is held in place by an abstract construction, which squares the image off into sub-compositions. Strange and foreign, this formal interference complicates the reading of the picture, while reinforcing the primacy of abstraction in Seheibitz's paintings.