“Jovi Schnell.” Flash Art International 37:235 (March-April 2004): 60.
Jovi Schnell “Round Trip” at Derek Eller. January 6-February 7, 2004
Reviewed by Melissa Pearl Friedling
They say that if you can remember the ‘60s, you weren’t really there – which is an accident of birth for Jovi Schnell, but her most recent paintings on display at Derek Eller put her in the company of numerous young artists recalling the trippy palette and iconography of ’60s-era psychedelia. For her third solo show at Derek Eller, Ms. Schnell has included five larger paintings, fully covering the canvases in the de rigueur acidic palette. The artist paints fantastical giantesses in a style that incorporates the art deco robot design of False Maria from Lang’s Metropolis and Léger’s machine-age cubism. In keeping with Ms. Schnell’s previous diagrammatic depictions of whimsical, closed circuit, gadgetry (and inspired by a very groovy muse), these divine robots are plugged in and “turned on” to their surroundings, communing, quite literally, with their landscape. Cyborg heart valves, for example, seem to sprout into leafy tendrils that twist into flowering pinwheels and bend around like a multi-hosed hooka pipe. And while the paintings seem more explicitly concerned with moving color and shape through space, these formal problems are successfully and strikingly solved against white backgrounds in an accompanying drawing series that is more reminiscent of Ms. Schnell’s earlier work.