Ecstasy and loss. Adolescence and Vulnerability. Beauty and decadence. That is how young artist Christian Schoeler described his work. Schoeler left this world too soon, in the last two years of his life, he was unable to paint anymore. He left us his works to remind us about what is the most important. "Portraiture is supposed to represent a person through his individual properties, and it kind of works like a memorial to that person. But what I'm interested in is the surface of the models. This thin, incorporeal mist which emanates from their bodies, and the film which envelops them. I'm trying to isolate the models' bodies in these undifferentiated recesses, in these excessive palpitations in which they're trapped, and I believe that these recesses and palpitations get to work only when they've been enveloped in surfaces. Paul Valéry hit the philosophical nail on the head when he said, "It is the skin that is the deepest".
I want to draw the person out and away from their properties. And then just maybe the painting can become the incorporeal double or the phantom of the model. All of this can happen when the hand guides the brush and brings form and light and masses of color into balance, as well as sense and nonsense, creating a singular event—an echo made from fortuitous swabs and lines."
"We are all, to an extent, victims of the era we live in. Intoxicated by the endless whirl of technological “progress,” it hardly ever occurs to us that the most essential questions may, in fact, be the most primitive ones. By confining these questions – to which no easy answers have ever been found – to the toilet bowl, by trashing history in our arrogant obsession with contemporaneity, we are only accelerating the process of universal destruction. It is with this knowledge, this supra-physicalist perspective, that Christian Schoeler moves forward. He very well might be asking the same questions as Rembrandt and El Greco before him, but it is not done in willful ignorance of the world he is living in. He knows this place is a world of ugly accidents, of brutalism, ignorance, and danger. It is a radical gesture to deal openly and directly with beauty in times like this. Christian Schoeler is a radical traditionalist, a neo-Romantic." Travis Jeppesen
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