GIOIA SCHULER

ART

I think that painting is a way to make sense of our experience, of sorting our thoughts in proper order, and each painting shows our unique way of understanding our world.

Owning a painting is much more than decorating a wall or treasuring a testimony; it is owning a moment of our history, of our internal metabolism. It is sharing that moment with others and making our individual experience a collective experience.

A painting is what I discover within me, and it is what promotes that discovery in others.

Copyright 2020, Gioia Schuler

Reflections

“Reflections on Water” is an experiment on how the visual experience can be deconstructed through body memory. Looking into the surface of water is experienced in relation to traditions encrypted in our body, capturing images and converting them into expressions conveying a sense of movement and rhythm. The process of painting has become for me a mixture of the deliberate intention of moving away from the real context and a synthesis of lines and colors in a spontaneous way. This abstract process is trying to capture the essence of the water without representing it.

Portraits

Usually, our discourse is the result of a private conversation we have with the people that shaped us. I wanted to give a “public face” to that “other side” of the conversation.

Having a conversation is letting the other person weave their ideas into the fabric of the person that we are.

Watergoose

I see my painting as an experiment, close to Abstract Expressionism and also close to French Expressionism; but my goals are different from theirs: I´m trying to represent a visual synthesis of my experience of seeing. That means to create a picture that summarizes a sequence of many consecutive images in just one - I´m trying to capture movement as a single still image.

According to M. Merleau-Ponty, this is possible because the body can imagine the movement and experience it while watching the picture. I learned about this in the book “Eye and Mind” and later I also obtained additional inspiration from the book “Memoirs of the Blind”, by Derrida. From the latter I learned about how an experience can be deconstructed through our own memory.

Drawings

I focus my sight in the picture without seeing the paper, just to see the movement of the line but without trying to represent any object, because I don’t want to copy the waves or the ducks, just the sense of rhythm they produce.

In this sense I am not drawing an object but a way of seeing, the way the body sees. The image of derived from a process of corporal synthesis, not as a representation of reality, but extracted from it. This means that my marks are not symbols, but they are traces of an inner process of memory.