Juxtapoz Journal – Hubert Schmalix Has Eyes Upon…

Nino Mier Gallery is happy to current Eyes Upon…., an exhibition of work by Austrian born and Los Angeles primarily based artist Hubert Schmalix. A sequence of recent figurative, panorama, and nonetheless life work comprise the exhibition. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery,

The works in Eyes Upon…. are charged with an emotional ambivalence between the paradisical and the melancholy. In Eyes Upon…., Schmalix situates the viewer in an off-kilter Arcadia. Experimenting with conventional topics of portray, his figures recall the robed males of classical antiquity, whereas his landscapes conjure the darker aspect of once-bucolic scenes.

Frequent motifs in Schmalix’s landscapes embody: wooden cabins, rock-lined rivers, undulating waves, considerable foliage, and dense preparations of flowers. The constituent components of an alpine utopia are in place, however are rendered in colour schemes that shoot the scenes by way of with enigma. A religious colorist, Schmalix favors deep, heavy colours like royal purple, russet, navy—tones that converse on the canvases with authority. Moreover, Schmalix’s figures have a tendency in direction of the remoted, forlorn, and growing old. They emerge with minimal adornments earlier than summary fields of pure colour.

In Schmalix’s work, the human stays largely remoted from the pure world. Massive-scale work depict bearded males earlier than opaque colour fields, amplifying their emotional tenor. Save for a stray leaf or department throughout the figurative work, humanity and the panorama are relegated to their very own compositions. Division turns into not solely a thematic, but additionally a proper motif in Eyes Upon….: figural and pure kinds alike are contoured with stark, exacting outlines that separate largely monochromatic sections of colour.

Coloration is a primary topic of Schmalix’s apply, occupying a standing as central kind and content material. Regardless of the numerous deeper, darker hues current within the works in Eyes Upon…., the work teem with gentle. “I’m not a painter who paints the sunshine. I create gentle by way of colour. That is what defines portray,” describes Schmalix, “One might additionally say I produce a light-weight that doesn’t exist in actuality.”