;”

Schooled in traditional realism, Alexey von Schlippe experimented with modifications of cubism and expressionism, then eventually looked back to early Renaissance painters such as Piero della Francesca and Giotto, and finally toward the masters of the Eastern Orthodox icon. In the early frescoes, altarpieces, and particularly in the icons, he observed a monumental simplicity of form which was later to emerge in his own painting. He also observed their highly explicit use of figures and objects as religious symbols, a method which he himself applies in a very different way.

 

• The medieval influence can be seen especially in the partially flattened, relatively shadowless faces of his figures, in their uniform, stylized postures, and in the overall reduction of voluminous space to a more two-dimensional area. There is in von Schlippe’s paintings, as in the medieval tradition, little illusion of perspective, no focal point, and almost no portrayal of action. Rather, each is a calm, comparatively immobile surface, the contents of which may be seen both as objects and figures on the one hand and, on the other, as symbols and idols pointing toward an undisclosed presence beyond the immediate visible world.
• Though medieval-like in manner and method, Alexey von Schlippe remains a modern in the sense of interminability pervading the majority of his pictures. The fixed theological vision of the Middle Ages gives way, in his paintings, to an absence of any strict metaphysical or mythological structure, and the stable medieval cosmos gives way to a suggestion of the fluctuating, expanding universe in which we find ourselves today. Finally, the ancient, set convictions as to our position, role, and destiny give way to a subtle interrogation of our very substance.

• Paradoxically, it is to suggest such an interminability in things that von Schlippe reduces perspective and excludes the focal point, which he defines as the “projected center of an artist’s own subjective point of view.” The focal point is absent in medieval painting also, but partially because the center is known, fixed, beyond the painter and the subject, in an absolute, universally accepted faith. In von Schlippe’s art, however, the focal point is absent because the center is unknown, indeterminate, and thus the latent presence beyond the forms depicted on the canvas
  remains a mystery.
• It is also to suggest an interminability in things that von Schlippe fills the objects of his still-life studies with such lightness, and light, that they appear to be hesitating between concreteness and abstraction. Their weight and density seem to be located elsewhere—centered behind them, perhaps, in an invisible zenith without which they would cease to be. It is to suggest the same quality, furthermore, that von Schlippe, in his landscapes, carries the objects of the countryside out of their natural settings, through various stages of abstraction, into a sort of kaleidoscopic overlapping of forms. Unlike the still-life objects, these fields, woods, clouds, skies are in motion and, at first glance, appear, perhaps, in a state of natural chaos. They are traversed, nevertheless, with lines composing rhythmical patterns that hint at the possible existence of a universal principle without which the objects of the world might cease to cohere.