Skarstedt Paris is pleased to announce ÉQUIPE TACHISTOSCOPIQUE, Jana Schröder’s first solo show at the gallery and her debut in Paris. On view from October 16 to December 2, 2023, the exhibition will feature a selection of new paintings.
In keeping with the abstraction and energy of the artist’s early works, the series presented in this exhibition continues to showcase her unwavering rigor: an orderly, meticulous construction that priotizes the interplay of color and form, rendered on a large scale.
Before beginning a series, Schröder designs self-imposed rules, restricting herself to a limited set of colors and pictorial compositions. Throughout the process, she questions her own preconditions, creating a tension between spontaneity and self-control. In contrast with the use of raw colors, tortuous lines and complex shapes defy narrative interpretation.
ÉQUIPE TACHISTOSCOPIQUE represents a new stage in Jana Schröder’s artistic career. This group of paintings is both the culmination of a resolutely color-oriented research initiative, and an investigation into the phenomenon of visual and mental perception. The title of this exhibition is inspired by the tachistoscope (from the ancient Greek takhýs): an optical device that sends a visual stimulus lasting only a few milliseconds to one of the two hemispheres of our cerebrum. Schröder’s reference to this device testifies to the preoccupation at the core of her work: the optical reception of colors, lines and shapes that are constructed in a series of intuitive action-reaction gestures that builds up to the culmination of a work. With this title, Shröder introduces the notion of the subliminal image, while remaining resolutely iconoclastic. Her paintings, two-dimensional and devoid of all symbolism, reference only themselves.
Unlike her early monochromatic series, in which the canvas saturated with an overcoat became almost opaque, her more recent paintings breathe, and shapes interact open and playfully. They appear to us as a visual stimulus, catching the viewer’s eye immediately, only to unravel on their own to the rhythm of the sound of her color. The use of white in her compositions brings a subtle depth to her paintings. White is used as a color rather than a background and strives to negotiate a balance between color and shape.
In this new exhibition, Schröder explores the organic dimension of her work. In PERLASYNTHIC MIK SM4, where each color envelops the one beside it, biomorphic patterns stand out. As if observed through the eyepiece of a microscope, the visual partition that once inhabited the canvases of Jana Schröder’s compositions is attenuated to let the eye fully penetrate a liquid universe in full oscillation, between structure and impulse. Placed flat on the floor to allow the material to spread out, the surface of the canvas becomes a glass slide on which the artist experiments, dissects and manipulates color and form, under surgical neon-like light.
Jana Schröder disrupts our ability to comprehend her works by associating each layer with a speed of execution, and therefore with a tempo assigned to a more or less rapid color plane. PERLASYNTHIC MIK SM5, where the motifs encircle each other, shows how the gesture pierces through the dominant colors. Different temporalities thus compete, almost imitating the workings of a clock, whose symbolism had already been explored by the artist in the exhibition WHAT TIME IS IT? at Skarstedt London in 2022.
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