Kelley Schei

Fancy fowls strolling between planting beds in the shape of squares, ovals or circles, parterres filled with broderies created with low boxwood resembling the patterns of a carpet, polychrome effects produced by plantings of flowers, or by colored brick, gravel or sand, exotic birds encaged in huge aviaries: The ornamental gardens of the Baroque style were manifestations of rationalism first; all vegetation was constrained and directed to demonstrate the mastery of man over nature. The formal gardens revealed man's need to domesticate the wilderness of nature, the dark, the dangerous and the unpredictable.

The ornament and thus the play between positive and negative, the immanent ambiguity of form, became a fundamental element of design of these gardens. They were cultivated only for aesthetic pleasure, rooted in a philosophy on aesthetic, which today could be called decadent. But the garden, to what ever extent sophisticated and anti-natural, stays the symbol of paradise, stays a locus amoenus, the refuge from the ordinary world. Kelley Schei's watercolour and gouache paintings refer to the garden architecture tradition of the Baroque epoch. Peacocks and other fowls appear on the light blue washes of the background. They are entirely composed of a variety of curved forms, of frequently overlapping pastel colored ornaments.

I use a complex palette, invented forms, and flattened, vertical space to create an imagined world heavily influenced by pre-modern painters, especially the Symbolist painters from the 19th century such as Odilon Redon, pre-modern decorative arts from the Rococo, and 20th century psychedelia. (Kelley Schei)

Kelley Schei thus transposes the repertoire of forms from the Baroque age to our present days. And the attempts to depict a metaphor of paradise today are, regarding the formal aspect, similar: Psychedelic paintings are based on symmetry, geometry and ornamentals forms. The so called fractals obey a strict system, they occur in the structure of snowflakes and are used to visualize the opposite of regularity: They can depict chaos. Fractals are, like ornaments, oscillating between positive and negative, light and dark, nature and intellect. And the formal gardens of the past seem, from this point of view, rather natural.

KELLEY SCHEI is a Chicago based artist and writer. She has shown drawings, paintings, and videos at international venues including the Chicago Cultural Center, Artists Space, Art Chicago, and the Moreau Gallery at St. Mary's College. She has contributed to art criticism journals including Popmatters, BAT, and Monsters and Dust, and worked as a gallery educator at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. She received a BFA from the Evergreen State College, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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