WOLF SCHULER

The Clown: a fool. A dreamer. A fantasist. He holds a mirror to himself, stumbles, and laughs. He doesn't know better but asks questions.

For Wolf Schuler, a paradoxical, contradictory, and surreal world unfolds, gripping, moving, and haunting him. In his paintings, people and animals, mythical creatures, Mephistos, Diabolos, and hypocrites, imaginative figures, grotesque beings act, metaphorically representing thoughts and emotions.

Fascinated by the visual world since the age of eight, Schuler was clear that his life's path should be in painting. Born in 1953 in Brixlegg/Tirol, he studied from 1971 to 1976 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, under Prof. Anton Lehmden. The artist is captivated by the expressive power of humans. It magically seizes him, and during his studies, he begins an uncompromising anatomical and psychophysiognomic exploration.

His portraits gain recognition far beyond Austria. In addition to artists and writers such as Herbert von Karajan, Norman Mailer, Lew Kopelew, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Matti Talvela, Renata Scotta, Jose Feliciano, he portrayed impactful personalities like Viktor Frankl and Sir Karl Popper, the Dalai Lama, as well as figures from business and politics, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Rudolf Kirchschläger, Prince Franz Josef II of Liechtenstein, Japan's Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda, and many others.

After years of seclusion, the artist now provides insight into his current work.

works

Interview

Mr. Schuler, some of your pictures reach extraordinarily large formats of 15 - 20 square meters and more. How do you arrive at this challenging visual language, enormous in scale and content? Your pictures can't be grasped at a glance, you almost have to walk through them in order to experience them.
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For me, painting a picture means creating an expanded view of the world. Images of thoughts, emotions and visions force themselves upon me and search for a correspondence. I don't ask for rationality, but let my intuition run free. I am also fascinated by deeper structures behind the surface that are superficially concealed, i.e. not visible. Our human nature tends to strive for attention and recognition. When I question this for myself, extreme contrasts and contradictions open up. Self-proclaimed world explainers, often sophisticated, power-hungry narcissists, rule and manipulate. I experience myself as a discoverer who is often approached by a world of paradoxes. The creation of a picture is comparable to the staging on a stage. In many cases, the format grows as the individual ideas become more concrete and push themselves into the limelight. Spontaneity, the inspiration of the moment, opens the way to manifestation.
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His work shows a variety of thematic focuses, ranging from room-filling depictions of apocalyptic worlds, sometimes filled with hundreds of figures and the most unusual scenarios, crazy worlds populated with mythical creatures and genderless, clown-like figures.

Apocalypse is a recurring theme in art history because it affects us (across generations) to the core. Personally, I am affected by the abstruseness and boundless hypocrisy that we discover behind the facades and I also find myself a protagonist, part of this collapsing, collapsing world. I do not know what lies ahead, nor do I see myself called upon to lecture or criticize others. My apocalyptic pictures reflect the powerlessness and irrationality of the present. I leave it to the viewer to interpret the situations and solve the mystery.
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Again and again, your pictures feature people and figures with musical instruments in all possible variations.

The subject of concerts has fascinated me for years. My current concert pictures, or rather
"crazy" concert pictures, reflect pure individualism. Detached from any score, each instrument tries to outdo the other. Self-promoters dominate these scenes and their absurdity also makes us laugh at the obvious absurdity of a competition between instruments. In these pictures (as well as in the entire oeuvre of my work), the viewer often encounters my opulent desire to fabulate, to trivialize and caricature actions and scenes to the point of ridiculousness.

Mr. Schuler, you also describe your studio as a "crazy laboratory". What exactly do you mean by that?
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For centuries, alchemists tried to produce gold in their laboratories, which unfortunately failed. I am more interested in portraying the helplessness or powerlessness of unsuccessful relationships/lifestyles, and I do so with provocation. I place the modern, autonomous person at the center of my discussion, who knows no boundaries, takes everything without limits and, as a nihilist and narcissist, pushes himself to the center/ foreground, who knows everything better and tricks his surroundings without empathy. I describe/create what I perceive.
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Diabolo and Mephisto seem to occupy you as figures in your paintings.

In Tyrol, where I grew up and the "Tuifel" peeps out from around every corner, I was frightened off by this total society even as a child. So the subject forced itself on me. Today, the "Tuifel", the Krampus, is omnipresent in pre-Christmas traditions. Enlightened modern man questions the devil; however, Baudelaire already said that the devil's most beautiful trick is to convince us that he does not exist. The devil's subtlety lies in hiding behind the mask, in distorting and slandering. Mephisto is endlessly present. Modern man wants to control everything, but powerlessness reigns.

‍We are overwhelmed by her depictions of the naked human body. On the one hand, we notice archaic, massive forms, sometimes larger than life, in compositions of intertwined bodies, and on the other, poetic images of couples with children, depicted beyond conventional perception. The range of motifs of the human body in its allure is far removed from loveliness, but rather characterized by rhythm, Eros and power.
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The human body in all its magnificent manifestations is always worth a journey for me, always something new and exciting to discover. Detached from a morally prudish bias, man and woman meet in my pictures, just as they do in everyday life. I do not deny the magic and erotic attraction inherent in human beings. In my nudes I do not reduce man and woman to sexlessness.

There are images that downright terrify us, such as depictions of monstrous snakes, tigers, people in animal form and sharks.

If we look at Christian terminology, the serpent as temptress primarily stands for Lucifer, Satan, the tempter, the enemy of God, for the evil that caused man's fall into sin. Not only in Michelangelo's work, but also in El Greco's depiction of the Laocoon group, I am seized by the theme of the serpent. People in animal form, mythical creatures symbolize the different characteristics of man and thus tempt us to play with them. In different variations, the depictions sometimes appear threatening, then again exaggeratedly grotesque.

In many pictures we encounter the jester, the clown, the harlequin and the pantomime, the faceless fellows, sometimes whirling through the air, sitting together in groups and wrestling with human figures.
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For me, all these characters are beings who seem to act unreal and nonsensically, crossing the boundaries of everyday life and thus becoming mockers of reality. Like an Eulenspiegel, they expose the double standards and hypocrisy of society. The history of clowns and fools goes back centuries in our culture and has lost none of its topicality. In my clown representations, the most diverse aspects and characters can be found, whether they act cunningly cunning or doltishly droll, malicious, humorous, sometimes empathetic. They all have one thing in common: they make us smile and laugh and promote self-awareness, especially when the jester speaks the truth. Personally, I like them very much and I see myself as a buddy of this clown society and not as an explainer of the world. The stage of my painting takes me into the realm of fantasy, into a theater of paradox.