To the observer, from their unique point of historical vantage, are bequeathed the traces of a playful toppling that precedes the leveling of all things. From the limitless separating and coming together, in the points of collision and in merging and demerging, the universe is cherry-picked and ordered like lines in an epic poem. The traveller is thus not struck into awe by the rising of the implacable ruin from the uncleared ground, the broken parapet thrusting its way clear of the tangle of branches, or by the steeply angled face of the pyramid casting its shadow on the flat of the plateau. The flatness of these sands already tells the ending, it is rather in the demanding nature of the ruin, to be recorded in the moments of its disintegration – to be recalled, reinterpreted and rebuilt from the oblique perspective in which the viewer finds herself – that she is struck into submission. So Schwartz too catches the crisis of events just so – recalling the tugging of the sash from the curtain, the cutting of the knot, the spiraling of feathers in air, the interminable movement of stone footings, the bending of brush hairs towards paper.

Paul Beekman, June 2011