Exhibitions —

Opening reception Saturday, October 25 from 3pm to sundown

april april is pleased to present I Can Feel Love More Deeply Than Ever Before, a solo exhibition with Columbus-based artist Benedict Scheuer.

The drawn line begins in the garden. The garden is necessarily both a physical and psychic plot. Herein the artist works: hollyhocks and sunflowers tower among resplendent dahlias and cosmos and asters; a host of life resounds in harmony. Gardens grow boundariless despite imposed limitations, making themselves again as life cycles iterate and weather chases time chases orbiting planets.

On a frame constructed from PVC, Benedict Scheuer stretches taut squares of Habotai, a plain weave silk that comes in varying weights. They first define the woven field with a border or edge and organic matter emerges: vines, leaves, snails, worms, butterflies and birds. Line is the essence and the unpredictable gesture of thought; on this material, their use of brushes and liquid dyes results in a necessary improvisation. Scheuer then suffuses the silk fields with irresistibly pure colors: viridian, sapphire, poppy red, and amethyst. Once dry, the artist rolls the silk up and bakes it in steam in a provisional device on their front porch, bonding dye to fiber.

Produced over the long summer of 2025, the silk drawings included here emerge from the artist’s ongoing gender transition, embodying sweetness and change. In Dusk and Rain Quenching Drought, rain, vine, and blood fractalize the self like the body seen through leaves. The guiding curve of a heron liberates flesh with outstretched wings. Line is erotic in as much as it is electric; it is radical in that it says who it is.

The practice of meditation, drawing and writing are entwined for Scheuer, who often begins such work by internally counting from 1 to 10—this creates the conditions for transcending everyday moil to reach deep sensorial connection. Sequences of color compartments and catapulting motifs map deliverance in a likewise way, as seen in Self Understanding and Break the Spell / Kernel of Endless Love Deep Inside. Pattern is the guide.

Scheuer’s silks hearken to Jean Cocteau and Samaiyu Akesuk; Andy Warhol and I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih. The drawn body is a leaky, ever transforming body, empowered by a language of feeling few are gallant enough to seek. In this sense, Scheuer draws to embody self and dissolve it, a practice inextricably bound to breath (meditation) and hand (planting, tending). “If the garden is good, then I must be, too.”

Benedict Scheuer (b. 1992, Cloquet, MN) lives and works in Columbus, OH. Scheuer holds a BA in Environmental Studies from Yale University and an MFA from the Ohio State University. Solo exhibitions include Doubt and Love, Marlborough, New York, NY (2023); Laughing Upon the Stretch of a Swooping Line, Abattoir at FORELAND, Catskill, NY (2023); Insignificant Patch of Earth, No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH (2022); and Spring Drawings, Belle Isle Viewing Room, Detroit, MI (2022).

In 2022, Scheuer was included in Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, the FRONT International at the Akron Art Museum. They attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023.