Andrew Schoutlz

GGLA is pleased to present Artificial Horizons In Real Time, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Andrew Schoultz. Surrounding the viewer with a painted world that the artist has been honing for the better part of three decades, Schoultz delves into far-reaching realms of esoteric knowledge, animal symbolism, and natural fauna, all built from the artist’s distinctive mark-making process. Through a deeply meditative method of repeated linework that composes everything from hazy horizons to owl fur, crashing waves to amphorae and beyond, the installation and individual works that compose Artificial Horizons In Real Time vibrate with an entirely analog optical intensity, demanding our presence and attention within the moment, providing a moment of grounding for both artist and viewer alike. Thus just as the title suggests, Artificial Horizons In Real Time, is just that–paintings grounded by an illusionistic horizon line, meant to be viewed, visually picked apart, internalized and grokked all within the thin timeframe of the present, yet to suggest that the works begin and end there is a simplification of the deeply layered qualities, both symbolically and materially, and the nature of Schoultz’s installation that envelops the viewer as they enter the gallery space.

Nature and animal life ground most of the works in one way or another. The artist’s paintings conjure an effect similar to what one has within a forest, of slowing down and using all of our senses, reducing the petty distractions of the everyday, and grounding oneself within both the moment and our insignificance within the universe. And much like the forest has a way of carefully controlling our experience within it, Schoultz deftly creates a similar experience for the viewer, crafting installation elements such as an archway that acts as a portal to the back of the gallery. Inviting viewers to step quite literally into a room painted floor to ceiling in a fade of colors that mirrors a brilliant desert sunrise, Schoultz utilizes the horizon as an anchoring aesthetic tradition within landscape painting, and as a metaphor for beholding the sublime while seeing what the future holds. Two paintings hung in tandem ground the painted wall. Within one, a heavyset vulture peers into the distance, perched atop a winding tree with a multi-colored snake wrapping around auxiliary branches, all set upon a barren fading landscape of yellow to orange to red. Small leaves bursting with color protruding from the ends of branches, and the presence of the vulture, that somewhat ominous sign, both suggest everlasting cycles of death, decay and then regeneration. In another work that shares the same palette, a gray owl deepened with shades of violet and purple, its striped feathers all built from Schoultz’s careful linework, sits on a gnarled branch of the same color, as a snake winds its way menacing over and around branches. Both works focus on birds of prey–apex predators that have evolved to have no natural predators themselves, a situation that mirrors that of humans, and yet still speaks to both the blessing and fragility of life.