JĀNIS ŠNEIDERS: INTERNAL TOPOGRAPHIES

With 1 : x ≤ ∞ Internal Topographies Jarmuschek + Partner presents the Latvian artist Jānis Šneiders for the first time in a solo exhibition at the gallery. 

Worlds open up in the paintings of Jānis Šneiders. 
The fine lines of his single-point perspective grids get lost in the impenetrable depth of shadows and darkness. The high-contrast pictorial spaces created with few means seem at once clear and mysterious, highly objective and extremely dramatic. Without any scale or context, they leave us reeling between inner and outer infinities. In spite of a perceived representational nature, they are abstract structures that can be located both externally-topographically and internally. Not fixed on a meaning, they are open projection surfaces for the viewer's imagination, for insights, memories, fears and longings. Depending on one's constitution, they can be read and filled negatively or positively. These wastelands of light and shadow may seem almost mythical and primeval to some. They suggest that somewhere there in the black the lines might really converge. A Big Bang-like key moment in which time and space, end and beginning connect? And where would we be in this scenario?

Jānis Šneider's works demand contemplation and reflection of the own existence. 
Their never-ending expanse makes us seem huge and vanishingly small at the same time, is able to evoke uncertainty as well as to give solace.

Whether we are looking at the raw data of a room or perhaps a symbol of emptiness, a stage or a surreal dreamscape remains open, Jānis Šneider's pictures are everything at the same time and yet they are not. They touch the core of magic and in their bold reduction point us to the potential and promise of painting: they are a crystalline snapshot of a conceivable state, a section of one of countless universes finally manifested in paint on canvas. 

+++

Jānis Šneiders (*1995) lives and works in Riga. He studied painting at the Art Academy of Latvia from 2015 to 2019 and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp during an Erasmus residency in 2018. He continued his studies at the Art Academy of Latvia until 2022, where he graduated with a Master's degree in Visual Communication. His works have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions in Latvia and Sweden and are included in prestigious collections. In 2017 he received a Rotary Art Society scholarship, and in 2019 the NBYAA Young Painter Award. At the POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair 2020, Jānis Šneiders was presented as the recipient of the Claus Michaletz Prize for Eastern European Art of the Secco Pontanova Foundation.