THOMAS SCHEIBITZ

Working in both painting and sculpture, Scheibitz’s reference points are often architectural. His organic forms and sharp angles smack of high design. Suggestions of location are found in patches of shrubbery green or sky blue. Working in washed-out pastel colours, his paintings seem to have faded through continuous exposure to the California sun.

Working from found media images, Scheibitz takes his subject matter from the empty and idealistic scenes of consumer culture. Deconstructing the original images into abstracted components, Scheibitz’s paintings become design-oriented simulacra: architectural blueprints for themselves. In Douglas, Scheibitz paints a kaleidoscopic distortion of suburban pleasantness, a kind of twenty-first century cubism that references virtual reality as much as painting.

Often working from doodle-like sketches, Scheibitz carefully maps out his compositions to create an order in space that seems both mechanical and biotic. Funny Game I is less an abstraction than an inkling of an abstraction in the making: thin washes create a dreamy sense of movement, a noncommittal translucent ground that evades concrete form. Exposing the process of artistic invention, he offers the viewer only fragmented suggestions, in which logical patterns or an insinuated subject might appear.