Pearl Schneider: Meanwhile Ages

Pearl Schneider’s painting installation challenges the boundaries of the medium, extending it to embrace sculptural forms, movement in space, and even video. She installs a polyptych or a makeshift screen—a folding model or pavilion of illusion and magic that make no effort to conceal their underlying mechanisms. The polyptych paintings frame a space, inviting observation as one moves between interior and exterior. The space that emerges between them is subject to a constant struggle between the impulse to organize and construct the world, and the creative drive to subvert and deconstruct it.

The artist-mother juggles her multiple roles in art and life, bound by her baby’s cycles of wakefulness and sleep. Time stretches elastically between these states as the windows of creation open and close intermittently. Elusive states of consciousness drift between the different spaces. When the child sinks into deep sleep, his mother emerges into a half-imagined, playful realm. Objects in the installation cast shadows, and layers of reality converge and draw apart. The act of painting settles briefly on the partitions, only to move on and vanish the next moment.

Schneider’s installation evolves at random intervals, absorbing the transient nature of the domestic sphere, employing basic colors, simple materials, and found objects collected by the artist. While resisting perfection, it is always heading towards it, offering subtle clues to the conditions of its formation. Her paintings juxtapose origin with representation, refusing to abide by traditional hierarchies. Perspective reveals itself as a subject unbound by earthly confines, as the grid delineates it with fine lines and threads, about to scatter in the wind.

Schneider’s work draws on a vast array of inspirations—from Byzantine frescoes in the ancient synagogue at Dura-Europos, through architectural innovations in Giotto’s late medieval frescoes, to the legends of Talmudic Midrash. Thus, for example, the painting Miriam’s Well alludes to a wall painting found in the same ancient synagogue, dating to the 3rd century. Tradition holds that this miraculous well provided water to the Israelites during their desert wanderings, thanks to Miriam the Prophetess, sister of Moses and Aaron. The painting depicts streams flowing from the well, nourishing the tents of the twelve tribes.

In an age when the boundaries between reality, truth, and fiction dissolve ever more swiftly, everyday life appears as a stratified, dreamlike representation, reaching out to life itself. Within this vision, the artist moves about, deep in thought, weaving together the turbid and the illuminated through dexterous manual labor that allows for surrender of control. Melancholic and heart-wrenching, her intimate theater is tinged with playful mischief.

Installation photographs: David Frenkel