Jovi Schnell
Free Categories #14
Free Categories #14 is a gouache on paper painting by Jovi Schnell. This work is exemplary of Schnell’s detailed and intricate style of geometric abstraction. Embracing a warm, muted color palette that contrasts greens and taupes with mauves and oranges, the work is composed of a series of rectangular and square compartments (or categories) that feature different combinations of shapes and forms. Some of the compartments feature simple geometric shapes like squares or circles, while others contain more complex imagery that reference machinery and other mechanical technologies. The work traverses in scale from the microcosm to the macrocosm via references to architecture, schematics, maps, anatomy, botanicals, living creatures, and apparatuses. By compounding and integrating these organic and man-made systems, the artist creates a symbolic visual language that offers an expression for a greater working complexity of life’s cycles, forces, and functioning. Free Categories #14 seeks to establish a balance in light of humans’ increasingly mechanized relationship to the natural world, while also foregrounding the evolutions found within life’s boundless permutations.