Ryan Schneider / Cast a Shadow - Solo Exhibtion. 25/10-1/12 Hezi Cohen Gallery
In an array of bold colors, Ryan Schneider unfolds before viewers human situations whose placement within domestic / rural backgrounds depicts a world in limbo between the bourgeois and the bohemian. Schneider's painting functions as an inventory, initially of objects and people, and later of emotional situations and conditions. The body of his work creates a series of psychological portraits of relationships.
The exhibition, entitled Cast a Shadow, which is also the name of one of the works, refers to the object that belongs to the last phase in an object-based painting – the shadow. The painter, and in his wake the viewer, first notice people and the objects that accompany them (the 'accessories' of life). Next comes the surroundings that provide the scenery, and then, awaiting us at the end of this path, are elements that belong to damp and humid world – shadows, tears, thickness of air.
In Schneider's latest works, 'domesticated' foliage is the dominant accompaniment to the human figure, that usually appears in the nude, as a fig leaf that blurs evidence of last night (that are in fact the interior designer of the spaces depicted by Schneider).
We tend to see our lives as a set of duties and rights: we carefully fulfill our duties and protect our rights. In his paintings Schneider conveys a reality that seems familiar, in which the right - leisure – has become an almost loathsome duty.
Ryan Schneider was born in 1980 in Indianapolis. He lives and works in Brooklyn. Over the past decade his work has been shown in a range of solo and group exhibitions.
