About:

Tomas Schats is a visual thinker who expresses himself through the utmost simplicity. He creates small drawings that derive their power from the barest minimum of expression. The moment you look at what he shows, words immediately fall short, because everything is made clear at a glance. Yet what you see is anything but unambiguous. The work is simply too radical for that. Each drawing is the ignition of a bomb that cannot be defused. An explosion is inevitable.

The innocence Schats projects is a carefree assault on the imagination. The fact that it unfolds on such a modest, almost miniature scale is deceptive. Its effect is like a blood vessel bursting—or rather, springing open—in your brain. Suddenly blood flows where it should not, triggering neural impulses that induce a kind of aphasia, not because you cannot find the words, but because those words do not yet exist.

You have to invent for yourself what you think of it. That hardly seems like much of an effort, you might say when confronted with these simple little drawings. Indeed, it is not so much an effort as a necessity. You have to think something about them—but what?

—Alex de Vries