Alex Schuchard “It’s All Going to be OK”

511 Gallery

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511 Gallery presents It’s All Going to be OK: Paintings by Alex Schuchard, a solo exhibition of new work, which will open on Friday, March 6th

Schuchard’s new body of work comprises eight oil-on-vellum paintings, in which he explores color, lines, light, and composition in a manner that is decidedly realist but borders on expressive abstraction. The artist begins with preliminary photographs emphasizing and deconstructing its elements into formalist qualities. By combining both the representational and the abstract, the paintings lack a specific narrative, but present an ambiguous image to which viewers can relate and from which they can derive comfort. The use of vellum allows Schuchard to play with the aspects of transparency and opacity, which gives him the basis for further abstraction.

Schuchard creates representational pieces that invite viewers to contemplate fleeting moments of life that often go unnoticed. The lines between landscape and abstraction, between reality and fiction, are deliberately blurred. Schuchard’s works reflect the intentionality of altering colors, lines, and textures while still staying in the realist spectrum.

Schuchard uses oil paint in colors that are close to what one would find in nature and he paints with brushstrokes that are gestural. He creates pieces that are not attached to any fixed meaning but reside in a nuanced state between reality and fiction, a place open to human contemplation.

Untitled I (2019), a painting of three long-stemmed roses, depicts this nuance between the representational and non-representational and reflects Schuchard’s interest in the transient moments of life. The painting is divided into three uneven pictorial spaces: On the left, in the white space, stands the tallest single rose in full bloom; on the right, by far the largest and most colorful backdrop delineated by the yellow space, are two other roses, both in wilting stages. Across the top horizontal plane of the painting is a black, negative space appearing as a void that creates illusionistic space and frames the roses below. Untitled I uses unrelated formal elements in conjunction with the roses to raise questions and contemplation of the passage of time, life, death. On all three colored segments of the pictorial space one can see and feel the artist’s hand in the vertical brushstrokes. The flowers can perhaps serve as metaphors for the impermanent emotions of everyday life: love, happiness, forgiveness, sorrow, and grief. Schuchard’s paintings are direct representations of forms that exist within the natural world, but they become more and more abstracted through the color choices and paint application employed by the artist.

Alex Schuchard received his BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and his MFA from University of Delaware. His paintings are in many private collections as well as in the collections of major corporations, including Dupont in Wilmington, Delaware, the Bloomberg Organization in New York, and Anheuser Busch in St. Louis, Missouri.