“Schnabel’s work is rooted in exploring and trying to define the difference between epiphany and the commonplace. In his recent series of drawings on nautical maps this tension is articulated in direct terms. Often a single gesture or cluster of painterly forms depicts the painter’s presence, a compressed or distilled essence…Through his treatment each map becomes a backdrop for events – pictorial events that he acts out, inviting narrative.”—David Moos, “Sounding in Fathoms: Julian Schnabel’s Recent Navigation Drawings” in Julian Schnabel: Navigation Drawings, 2008

Point Conception to Point Sur belongs to Julian Schnabel’s Navigation Drawings series, painted in the summer of 2008. Schnabel, who often works with found materials, took as his starting point for this series a group of vintage nautical maps. Painting abstract emblems onto the maps in oil, he subsequently mounted each composition onto a stretched linen canvas. Despite their domestic scale, the works in this series are suggestive of expansive pictorial space, evoked by the esoteric names of the far-flung locations the maps picture, and opened up by Schnabel’s distinctive brushstrokes. Bold and gestural, these painted interventions challenge and subvert the painstaking work of the mapmaker beneath them, which, for all their claims to topographical veracity, are likewise acts of calibrated artfulness.