The Brooklyn Rail

After nearly five years, German artist Thomas Scheibitz returns to the United States with Argos Eyes, named after Argos Panoptes, Hera’s giant watchman whose body was covered with eyes. Representations of eyes abound in this show’s paintings and three-dimensional constructions. Even at the gallery’s front desk, you can pick up a book whose pages have images of an eye or eyes drawn from Scheibitz’s extensive archives of contemporary and historical sources. Given how slowly his paintings evolve, often over the course of years, the eye as a key motif has been on Scheibitz’s mind for some time. When I spoke with the artist, we agreed that labels like “abstract” and “figurative” have lost all relevance in a world where hundreds of images cross our screens at all hours of the day. In the relentless visuality of the current media environment, the contemporary mind, like Hera’s mythical watchman, has become “all eye,” consuming images at breakneck speed. Through Argos Eyes, Scheibitz is asking an epistemic question: to what extent has this glut of visual information impacted our ability to give meaningful context to what we see? This is not just an academic argument. Methods of political control hinge on this issue, a fact made more pressing as governments across the industrialized world slide towards authoritarianism.

To answer that question, Scheibitz’s work explores how much of our visual interpretation is hardwired in the brain and how much of it is cultural. The line is one of those pictorial elements fundamental to art the world over. Line, in turn, governs how humans understand shape, the relationship between figure and ground, pattern, and many other principles of two-dimensional design. Scheibitz’s daily art process begins with quick sketches on A4 paper, whose visual ideas may or may not make their way into his paintings and constructions. The point here is that line is the motor of his visual inquiry, and Scheibitz’s fascination with this formal element has led him to an encyclopedic, cross-cultural understanding of all the ways it has been foundational to art, architecture, and graphic design. In the lower half of Argos Eyes (2024), an ancient Egyptian-style eye is enclosed in a hot pink frame. The lines that make up the eye are expressive; they vary in thickness, giving them an energetic pulse. The hot pink frame rests on a black-and-white plinth whose white outlines are rendered in thin, even lines that create the illusion of a three-dimensional slab. These lines are architecturally descriptive, but not expressive. Descriptive and expressive lines alternate throughout the composition of Argos Eyes, triggering a range of cultural associations. This work is a prime example of how Scheibitz builds an image whose constituent parts, beginning with line but ranging into shape and color, call into question how we should interpret them individually and vis-à-vis the whole. The painting is one big conundrum that resists our efforts to create a gestalt out of the image, forcing us to examine our habits of seeing. What is driving us to create a gestalt in the first place? What part of that is cultural? What is innate?

Scheibitz is at his most analytical in Display Table (2025). The work consists of a white table that holds forty pieces, each in conversation with its neighbors. The connections that we make between them veer from the purely formal (e.g. line, shape, and color, which are innate to perception) to the iconographic (classifying images through shared content) to the personal associations any of us might bring to a random assortment of objects. On the formal end, a white Styrofoam cube at one end resonates with a stack of square cards at the other end. Iconographically, a sculpture of an apple and a painting of a rose speak to each other as vegetative motifs. This viewer made an association between an orange painted arrow that looks like a traffic sign and some lime green painted strips that resemble highway medians, maybe because I had been driving a lot that week. In Display Table, Scheibitz is asking us to exercise discernment, rather than dismissing the whole as a jumble. When we really look, we begin to make sense of it all. When we allow ourselves to be passively bombarded with images, everything becomes a blur. Scheibitz was born in East Germany, an authoritarian regime that fed its citizens a steady diet of bullshit, so he has a clear understanding of the dangers posed by a demagogue who manipulates our attention economy to distract and confuse. In engaging us with its visual pleasures, Argos Eyes pleads with us to step back and sharpen our vision.