Adrian Schiess

Adrian Schiess’ best known works are probably his « flache Arbeiten » (flat Works). These have earned him the unjust reputation of being a somewhat arid concrete or minimal artist.
Yet he has produced pieces at opposite ends from this aridity: poetic or even lyrical pieces sometimes including baroque elements, deeply visual pieces, immediately evoking Monet, De Kooning or Fautrier. His titles refer to nature – summer, mimosa, moon rise…- and particularly to the notion of time, a notion that his works deal with in a very personal way. Deeply cosmic, each one of his paintings appears as part of a whole – and this is an almost romantic side to the Flache Arbeit series, an endless work in progress which neither strives to stabilize or to define itself precisely, quite the contrary. The artist is more concerned with “reuniting painting and reality”. Providing a way of experiencing the present moment remains essential to his practice: reflections come and go on the glossy surface of the paintings, they move, change, disappear. The artist describes these reflections as “the eternally fleeting images of reality and the present.” A vision at once “sad and beautiful”, rendered “melancholy” by its inexorable aspect, and by the glaring lack of certainty which opens like a void before us.
Akin to zen philosophy, as well as to western tragic philosophy (Montaigne wrote “I do not depict what is, I depict what is passing”), Adrian Schiess makes us feel, with purely visual means, without discourse and perhaps without concepts – (should we consider that feeling and understanding are really two different approaches, or rather that they are closely intermingled?) not only the limits of painting but also of life. The end result is of little consequence : only the process counts, testimony of life, and the global vision of a single oeuvre, comprising the infinite universe, of which his own work is only a fragment.
Schiess’ use of modern and technological materials, rather than proving our ability to master events and our own condition, underscores the subjection of each individual to the whole - what Schiess calls “the eternal story of human tragedy”*: man will always remain the infinitesimal part of something greater, to which he will always return, whatever his useless bustle, his aspirations or achievements. Perhaps somewhat more lasting, our determination, apparent in our gestures, the constant renewal of form, the experience of painting and also that of looking: each part reveals the whole, each moment reveals eternity.

Claire Bernstein

Adrian Schiess