Thomas Scheibitz

Initially appearing like an advertisement for a luxury brand of fragrance or cologne, on closer inspection the ostensible subject of Thomas Scheibitz's Perfum, 1999, appears to disintegrate into abstraction. The artist's elaborate restructuring of the presumed message of advertising results in one of his most persuasive tributes to the infinite potential of oil paint.

Scheibitz draws his motifs from an ongoing collection of found images. Advertising, news photography and even crossword-puzzles are the humble, overtly contemporary sources from which he stages his ongoing exploration of his traditional medium. Perfum stands out among Scheibitz's work, due to his knowing nod in the direction of the conventions of art history. Like the model in a classical portrait by Giorgione or the religious icons of the High Renaissance, the perfume bottle is centred in the painting in a landscape that recedes towards the horizon. The much celebrated 'discovery' of single-point perspective in the Italian Renaissance necessitated a low vantage point, making the viewer seemingly gaze upwards towards the motif. Coincidentally, today's advertisers employ the same devices to subliminally increase our desire for products, such as perfumes, by using cropping and photographic techniques to enhance allure.

In Perfum Scheibitz methodically strips his motif of detail and reduces his painting to a set of flat picture planes. The result is a delightful puzzle of colours and shapes.

A suggestion of vegetation in the foreground is kept in strong earthy tones with pink and yellow accents. The anthropomorphised form of the bottle is built up of myriad pink cell-like fragments. In the background, two mountains that are not unlike Cézanne's early landscapes appear solid by just a minimum of detail. Borrowing freely from the vocabulary of modern and abstract art, what might appear to be mere surface at one instant takes on the appearance of solid form in the next moment.