In Ashley Hans Scheirl's paintings, bodies, taboos, and materiality coalesce into a sensually charged composition. In “Highly Decorated Painter” (2024), a yellowish jet bursts from the fingers of a mysterious figure—hovering somewhere between a fountain, a floral bouquet, and an obscene gush. Emerging through this mist is a fragmented face: no forehead, but striking cheeks, a pronounced chin, and piercing eyes that return the gaze like a mask. While the face evokes the clarity of a graphic advertising motif, the body beneath dissolves into ambiguity, a knobby, thickly modeled form, doughy and indeterminate.

Scheirl employs acrylic paints, synthetic, plasticized material, and harnesses the illusion of spraying, trickling, and pouring to evoke organic bodily processes. The applied particles suggest moist fluids or refuse. Zones of white, black, and gray create swellings and uncertainties, underscoring the tension between purity and filth, moral order and taboo.

A recurring motif is the yellowish, stencil-like silhouette with an egg-shaped aperture. It enters the pictorial space like a stage backdrop, casting a shadow, and invites readings as either a pair of lips or aroused labia. At its lower edge hangs a golden chain bearing a brush, rendered with striking naturalism. At once an artistic tool and a symbol of flaccid potency. It stands as a deliberate counterpoint to the feminine outline of the stencil.

Thomas D. Trummer, 2025