“Here we have not figures but geometric forms, which constitute the figures of our age, inhabited as it is by technology and straining towards the de-materilization and the abstraction of the physical.  But art tends instead to render form evident, to give a physical presence even to geometry.  In fact Schatz’s forms, whether in two or three dimensions, are always concrete linguistic realities, statements of an order of ideas that is never repressive and closed, but fertile and unpredictable.”

Achille Bonito Oliva, Director of the 1993 Venice Biennial
(view the entire exhibition catalog essay for Lincoln Schatz, Sculpture + Drawings + Prints (1996) here)

Technology develops productive processes anchored to standardization, objectivity, and neutrality. These are constitutive principles which have a different fertility than those of the traditional hyper-subjective idea of the difference.

Untitled 40 & 37, 1995 (41.5″ (w) x 29.625″ (h), oil stick on paper)

Untitled 40 & 37, 1995 (29.625″ (h) x 41.5″ (w), oil stick on paper)

Schatz predisposes an initial form which is progressively developed through modular moments that multiply, without repeating, the point of departure.

Not coincidentally, this American artist continually travels between the two dimensional space of the design and the three dimensional space of the execution of the form, from the black and white of the idea to its polychromatic articulation.

Untitled 10, 1995 (41.5″ (h) x 29.625″ (w), oil stick on paper)

Untitled 10, 1995 (41.5″ (h) x 29.625″ (w), oil stick on paper)

Untitled 9, 1995 (41.5″ (h) x 29.625″ (w), oil stick on paper)

Untitled 9, 1995 (41.5″ (h) x 29.625″ (w), oil stick on paper)

Untitled 16, 1995 (41.5″ (h) x 29.625″ (w), oil stick on paper)

Untitled 16, 1995 (41.5″ (h) x 29.625″ (w), oil stick on paper)

Untitled 13, 1995 (41.5″ (h) x 29.625″ (w), oil stick on paper)

Untitled 13, 1995 (41.5″ (h) x 29.625″ (w), oil stick on paper)

Untitled 11, 1995 (41.5″ (h) x 29.625″ (w), oil stick on paper)

Untitled 11, 1995 (41.5″ (h) x 29.625″ (w), oil stick on paper)

This work is a demonstration that the idea engenders a creative process that is not purely demonstrative, but prolific and proliferating. In fact, the final form, in two or three dimensions, proposes a visual reality that is not abstract, but concrete, pulsing under the analytical and emotional glance of the spectator.

The work carries within itself the possibility of an asymmetry that is accepted and assimilated in the conception, which participates in the mentality of modern art and in the conception of the world that surrounds us, constituted by the unforeseen and the surprising.

Instead, it becomes the result of a new anthropology of man which functions according to a metabolism of modular reason which does not, however, mean a logic of symmetrical repetition but of asymmetrical multiplication, an application, precisely, of the new rules of intelligent chance as opposed to indistinct chaos.

In some way the ethic of making prevails over the politics of creating; an ethic which, in any case, isolates a process of focusing on the conceptual and executive procedures of art.

In the work of Schatz, as in that of European and American artists of the second postwar period, there emerges a concept of a healthy negative utopia, understood as the awareness of the inability of art to found an order outside of its own precinct.