[…] The perspectives in David Schnell’s pictures have changed: What the gaze once saw before it, the strict pull from all edges of the space into the middle of the radiant world, a view from the central eye of the observer, is now replaced by an overview down from above. From the tower, from the apex of the pyramid, from an inexorable camera circling in the sky? An observation absolved from the human point of view, as taken by machines. It is the view of the angel of history. And before this eye, the deserted places are transformed—here, we ourselves adopt this non-human view—into states of things that no longer obey the basic truths of space and time. The structure bares itself. Components join it, lose their solidity, transform themselves. And the more our eyes approach the surfaces of the painted canvas, the more what we had just perceived as geometrically organized eludes us. We find ourselves in lucid abysses and floating shafts from which even the earth’s gravity has departed. What is architectonically determined no longer complies, it dwindles or deepens itself in willfully extended passages and chambers driven deep into the space that hide their functions from us and behave in the state of abandonment like rampantly proliferating crystals. Reflecting surfaces form from spaceless slabs. They flake off as glowing components from cubic volumes, rise and float toward an original state or end bang of which no one who departed knew anything. The connections of inner-worldly order are burst. An interfering, loosened matter released from human hands and gravity. We see that, in David Schnell’s painting, “the immediate reality of things dissolves and their components are used to actualize [painterly] goals—without regard for whatever inviolabilities that resulted from the earlier image of man and nature.”

Text by Bertram Haude (Extract)