Robert Schatz’s work takes time to see; if you're in a hurry, you might miss a line. 

Stop, even take a seat. You should probably touch the bumpy paint, but do so mostly with your eyes so Bob doesn't get mad at me. 

An older New York gallerist once told me his story of visiting Giorgio Morandi's studio in Bologna in the early 1960s. The gallerist was young and greatly admired Morandi (the same is true of Bob, whose own work is probably most influenced by Morandi, as seen in his early still life works and later Paesaggio series). There was a small Cézanne print in Morandi's studio. The gallerist commented that he didn't understand Cézanne, to which Morandi replied: "Keep looking."

Bob's work is a sensual, harmonious mess. You can see thick overlaid lines glow out of the paint itself and thinly disappear back into their own world. No part is revealed all at once. You'll feel it but you won't know what you see. 

Trained first in history and philosophy (as well as three years at the seminary), he paints his own spiritual investigations. The line becomes a means of thinking through the relationship between order and chaos, the individual gesture and the larger systems in which we exist.

Central to this search is his engagement with Buddhist and East Asian thought. His interest in Chinese and Japanese ink painting extends beyond their formal gestural economy. The visible residue of a particular action is inseparable from time, movement, and consciousness. Buddhist notions of impermanence and interdependence find a natural correspondence in compositions where forms rarely appear fixed or autonomous. Lines gather, disperse, intersect, and transform, suggesting an evolving intangible landscape.

Bob’s fascination with the Western pictorial tradition runs alongside his philosophical concerns, particularly the Renaissance investigation of perspective, proportion, geometry, and the construction of space. Yet where Renaissance painting sought to reconcile the world within a coherent spatial order, Bob introduces unpredictability into that structure. Geometry remains present, but is animated by gesture; perspective gives way to multiple trajectories; order continually encounters the unpredictable logic of organic growth.

Bob is an organized guy who doesn't let himself control everything he does. He uses Nature's golden ratio during the early stages of his paintings only to build their inner life: they are both carefully planned and painted with his fingers. They're slow, yet they happen like storms - kinda like Bob himself: always calm, but his laugh is thunder. 

It's been about 10 years since I first met him, when he had an exhibition of paintings and sculptures at The Phatory, a small street-level Lower East Side gallery, the perfect scale for his intense, energy-filled art. The decades spent in downtown New York, including the Lower East Side and East Village, introduced him to another kind of visual language. Graffiti, tags, scratched surfaces, and layers of urban inscription share something fundamental with calligraphy: the immediacy of a human gesture transformed into a sign, a symbol, and its potential mystery. Both the meditative brushstroke and the graffiti register presence in time - often an anonymous, unintelligible trace of humanity.

In Bob’s work, histories enliven one another. Renaissance order encounters Buddhist impermanence; contemplation of Nature meets the restless artificial chaos of New York. The line binds them together, consciousness moving through a world that is never still.

Inaugurating my gallery with Bob is a blessing.

Nicolas Graille

New York, September 8th, 2026.

Vers la terre et les étoiles, un bisou à ma mère, Hélène Lazare, née un autre 8 septembre.