Today we talk about

Robert Schaberl

Born in Feldbach Austria in 1961.

After his degree in painting and art education at Mozarteum of Vienna in 1985, he traveled to USA where he lived for one year. Actually he lives and works in Vienna

His early oil on canvas works included an exploration of floating, lava-like forms and waterfalls, rippling across the surface with a focus on motion and space.

Instead of adding different colours together, he explored the ratio of linseed oil mixed in with his paint. The oil gave shininess to the paint, and so by adding differing quantities to the pigment, Schaberl was able to create different modulations of glossiness.

The varying degrees of glossiness and the subsequent reflection and refraction of light achieved through the central focus provided by the circle marked a seminal point in Schaberl’s practice.

It was in 2000 when Schaberl came across Iriodin – an industrial pearl lustre pigment used in everything from car manufacturing to the cosmetics industry – and a watershed moment occurred. “The incorporation of Iriodin allowed me to really explore the optical properties of the work, and, more importantly, by combining it with regular paint, I was able to create hues that change colour.” With Iriodin, Schaberl began the precise alchemical process with which he calculates the colour combination for his works.

The paint is applied by laying the canvas on a turning pivot, rather like a potter’s wheel. Schaberl then spins each work by hand while painstakingly applying layer upon layer of paint, often starting with a fluorescent base, which gives many of his works their characteristic brightly colored ‘halo’. He then alternates gloss paint with Iriodin-enhanced colours, carefully gauging the amounts in order to create the precise effect he has in mind. The result is paintings that change colour depending on where the viewer is standing. The final effect is of light dancing across the surface and a gradual fluctuation of colour, rather akin to the sheen of a CD or LP record, or the rings of a tree. This use of the pigment was unprecedented, and led to a subsequent collaboration with largescale pigment manufacturer Merck, who supported Schaberl to do create a special façade for the Graz University of Technology in Austria.

 

Studio visit

Without light there is no colour, yet here, Schaberl tells us, without us there is neither – the very immateriality of what we thought we knew and what we experience means that the work is not what we see painted on the canvas, but, rather, exists only in the moment that we view it.

Robert Schaberl is best known for his “Zentralformen (Central Forms)” series, sleek paintings of circles that at first appear to be monochromatic. Upon closer inspection, the compositions reveal delicate layers of multi-colored paint—Schaberl often uses 50–70 shades of different pigments—that shift in the viewer’s eye, according to their position in relation to the work. His paintings can take on a somewhat extraterrestrial appearance, like abstracted photographs from the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope. “I see my paintings as objects in space, objects without a clear color-definition,” he says. “The colors I want to achieve are always undefinable, never just blue or red or yellow or green, but always unseizeable.”

 “CENTRAL FORMS”

The Columns Gallery

Seoul/Singapore

3000 sqm large glass façade art project for new
chemistry building of the Technical University,Graz