Oil Stick and Charcoal Drawings
Beginning in 1993 Lincoln Schatz initiated work on a series of drawings, on paper and canvas, executed in oil stick and charcoal that take up an iterative conceptual approach towards abstract drawing in a technological age.
These artworks employ a logic and methodology that will inform the next two decades of Schatz’s generative, new media computer-based, artworks. Using algorithms, chance, rulesets and the unpredictable, the resulting works possess a playful and dynamic tension in their geometric forms. The creation of these drawings span a two year period of fruitful work that sees two-dimensional geometric forms, as the exhibition catalog written by 1993 Venice Biennial Director Achille Bonito Oliva describes, “germinate and multiply with unexpected placements that unfold.”
Yell, Use Both Hands, 1995 (79” (h) x 97” (w), oil stick on canvas)
The works from this period, drawings on paper and canvas, as well as sculpture and prints, were first exhibited with Galeria Ferran Cano in Mallorca, Spain in 1996 and can be found in private collections globally.
Untitled (charcoal drawing) by Lincoln Schatz, Interior Design by Steve Kadlec & Jason Hall
Photography by Tony Soluri Photography
“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.
In this respect Schatz, like LeWitt, together with Warhol, is a classically American artist, a healthy bearer of an art capable of producing difference through the creation of forms that utilize standardization, objectivity, and neutrality in a fertile manner; that is, able to filter through the imaginary of a mass society pervaded by the primacy of technique, and by this technique emptied of subjectivity.
Exhibition Catalog: Lincoln Schatz, Sculpture + Drawings + Prints, Galeria Ferran Cano, Mallorca, Spain
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.
Schatz predisposes an initial form which is progressively developed through modular moments that multiply, without repeating, the point of departure.
Conventionally, geometry seems to be a field of pure evidence and inert demonstration, a place of a mechanical and purely functional rationality. Schatz has instead developed a different use for geometry, as the prolific field of an irregular logic that loves to develop its own principles asymmetrically, adopting surprise and emotion.
“The module becomes the structural element which fuses the possibility of a form which plays upon the complexity of a potentially infinite multiplication of the surprise of geometry.”
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.
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.
Private Collection: Chicago (left: Tahir Fatah, center: Lincoln Schatz, right: Zoran Mojsilov)
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.
Exhibition Catalog: Lincoln Schatz, Sculpture + Drawings + Prints, Galeria Ferran Cano, Mallorca, Spain
“Intelligent chance signifies man’s capacity to accept discontinuity without falling into the desperation of an impotent rationality.”
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.
Skinny Dip, 1995 (79” (h) x 97” (w), oil stick on canvas)
“This is the procedure used by Schatz who, in his own way, constructs monuments to contemporary reality.”
Untitled, Vertical Diptych, 1995 (60″ (h) x 41.5″ (w), oil stick on paper)
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.
“These forms are always of a domestic monumentality, which does not allude to the arrogance of American skyscrapers or to the rhetoric of sculpture.”
Excerpts are from Achille Bonito Oliva’s (Director of the 1993 Venice Biennial) exhibition catalog for Lincoln Schatz’s 1996 exhibition with Galeria Ferran Cano, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. View the entire exhibition catalog here.
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