Priska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to present One-Dog Night, Ryan Schneider’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. By brushing, scraping, and flinging bright colors of oil, Schneider presents us with canvases that expose subtle openings of pathos and sublimity, skewing the reality of day-to-day interactions.

With a contemporary sensibility, Schneider deploys lessons of modernism, reconfiguring them into his own visions of nervous domesticity and interrupted leisure. Drawing on found images, his memories and relationships, personal photographs, and imagined decor, he constructs environments that formally invite the viewer in. He then reverses the assumed roles of interior and exterior space for his audience by seating them in an awkward, broken chair, and then kindly directing their gaze out the window. The figures that drape these constructed spaces exude a sinister innocence, appearing caught by surprise, their self absorption evident. The viewer is the voyeur, and is left with a sense that these characters’ actions will continue long after they cease to be scrutinized.

Schneider’s painting technique ranges from awkward and crude to surprisingly graceful. His concern with the medium is physical – he thickly layers paint and then scrapes it away with a palette knife, revealing what is beneath the surface. Schneider similarly does this with his characters by layering them into his compositions. They appear pre-occupied and unaware. He then exposes them, revealing their complicity and gradually allowing them to assert a complete personality.

A vast array of character nuances resonates from Schneider’s subjects. Traces of traits such as strength, fear, humor, stubbornness, and eccentricity are what remain of the image after one has finished digesting its meaning, giving these works unusual gravity and unleashing enormous psychological power.