Snapshots of intimacy

The paintings in Kevin Schott's current series show what appear to be »small scenes« from a private everyday life – a touch, an embrace, a friend offering comfort, a person resting on the beach. And yet the scenes are anything but banal. In an indeterminate way, they convey a deep intimacy, allowing the viewer to get very close to the figures. The mood is often ambivalent, evoking both a sense of security and Weltschmerz, of arriving at the end of a path or setting out on a new journey. Born in Osnabrück, Germany, in 1991, the artist now lives and works in Bochum. His artistic roots lie in graffiti, with a rapid painting style in an urban aesthetic, two qualities that still characterise his oil paintings today.

Schott often works in series that allow him to explore a topic comprehensively, to present various aspects, details, variants and nuances. A striking feature of his current series Enjoy the White is the regular use of negative space, which plays a decisive role in the perception of the image. It draws the focus to the elements most relevant for artistic expression while also offering the viewer a space to fill in the blanks themselves. Even without leaving anything out, images are interpreted differently by each viewer. In Schott's work, however, they are also individually filled in by the mind's eye, supplemented from the viewer's personal experience to create a composition that relates to their own reality of life. Those who engage with this should be aware of the risk, as Schott's images harbour the danger of touching you completely unexpectedly on a deep, emotional level.

The blanks in the pictures reinforce a second phenomenon that is inherent in all the pictures in the current series, for they emphasise the ambivalence of identities. In our daily lives, we are accustomed to drawing conclusions about a person's personality and identity from their appearance. In Schott's images, our (pre-)judgment is based on only a few fragments of a person, which we complete to form an overall picture, a fragmentary snapshot to which we tell ourselves a story in an effort to interpret the context, to fathom the emotional state of the figures, and finally to unintentionally recognise a hidden aspect of ourselves.

More about the artist: Kevin Schott's artist page