Portraits are uniquely challenging from the standpoint of an artist.  They must replicate minute facial features so precisely that the subject can be distinguished from every other human being ever.  If that weren’t daunting enough, a successful portrait must also accomplish a paradox.  If I want a portrait of myself, I’d like it to convey someone better or more than what I see in the mirror; I’d like to see someone else.  If however, I see a portrait of someone else, I’d like to relate to that individual in some very human way; I’d like to see myself. A successful portrait is either a fantasy of someone else when it’s portraying us, or a mirror of us when it’s portraying someone else.

Pictures of celebrities are easy; portraits of celebrities are nearly impossible. In addition to the above difficulties, the artist must now overcome a cargo ship of visual baggage. Celebrity faces are so completely melded with their “product” that it becomes impossible to separate the person from the marketing, to escape the false sense of familiarity and actually see them as we would a stranger on the subway.  A celebrity photograph, whether digitally retouched for a poster or sold to a gossip magazine by paparazzi is not a portrait - it's a one-frame movie in which they play another character.  It breaks the necessary paradox for successful portraiture: it's a sitter as "someone else" for an audience of "everyone else".

In Schoeller’s celebrity portraits, I recognize the faces but feel like I don’t know these people at all.  It’s a feeling like seeing someone at a party that your eyes recognize but your brain does not, or when you’re walking down the sidewalk and think “That’s weird, that guy looks exactly like Bill Murray”. Through Schoeller’s lens, Seinfeld is not friends with George, Elaine and Kramer; he’s suddenly just some guy who had a job as an actor/comedian.  Somehow the subject has been split from their own product, the viewer has been disoriented just enough to create a crack - an opportunity to forget how we’ve always seen them so we can recognize ourselves. And he does this without altering their physical features at all.

Though Schoeller’s current show at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler includes a number of celebrities, the main focus is a series of female bodybuilder portraits.  Again we’re looking at objectified individuals who, for a different reason (and for better or worse), cannot escape their own first impression.  These are women who in one circle are admired and envied, and in other circles are judged as freaks.  As with his other portraits, Schoeller doesn’t pass judgment, he just records them as they are yet somehow shows us ourselves:  vain, self-doubting, proud, alone, aspiring, and what we perhaps all fear the most: being like everyone else.