David Schnell's Perspective: Made to Order

A lot of paintings feel as if they're more about nostalgia than about the world today. Leipziger David Schnell, however, seems to build links between painting's past and culture's present.

His large-scale landscapes, on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center as part of its show of New Leipzig School paintings, are built around extreme perspective views. They portray the land rushing away toward a remote vanishing point, like the tiled floor in a Renaissance altarpiece. Everything that sits above Schnell's ground seems boxed and built for easy perspective calculation: Hay bales are rectangular solids with the barest overlay of dry-grass texture; the leaves of trees float free as identical and regular ovoids. Every form is chosen for its easy disposition and rotation through Schnell's manufactured, calculated space. Even his shadows look too crisp to be true.

But even though these devices hark back to Western painting's Renaissance roots, they also recall the most prominent descendant of old-time perspective: the computer game. It also uses geometric calculations to help build a fictional world.

When I contemplate Schnell's bucolic scenes, I feel I should be rushing through them in a car in a Nintendo race. The limits of most desktop processors -- like the limits of early perspective art -- force the world to conform to a strict set of rules for how it's assembled. The result is an artificial reality that, for all the effort to make it hang together, is always on the verge of pulling apart.

Turn too quickly on a Nintendo course or smash into one of its hay bales, and you change the world more quickly than the computer can put it back together; there are moments when the scene breaks up into a pile of component parts, geometric but askew. Likewise for Schnell's world of hand-calculated space: There are disjunctures where things don't seem quite right, however much the "rightness" of perspective space seems to be what his art's about.

In "Bales," a string of pennants zigzags through thin air, seeming to hover at once behind and right above a bale of hay that also seems to float untethered from the ground. A picture called "Planks" seems eager to make the messy remnants of a disused barn conform to perspective order -- but mostly seems to fail in the attempt.

I've no idea if Schnell is aware of ties between his images and an Xbox. But his subject matter does seem to invoke some notion of imposed order in tension with a disorderly world -- which is part of the appeal of both his art and of video game play, where smashing the status quo and watching it reconstitute itself are part of the fun.

I'm told that the ground Schnell's hay bales rest on in fact depicts a former Luftwaffe landing strip now commandeered by local farmers, and that the crumbling "barn" on view in "Planks" was once a military hangar. Schnell's perspective paintings convey the unnatural order that the German state once attempted to impose on things. And, in the very fact that Schnell's orderings fail, may act as a rebuttal to the state's attempts.