The Timemarkers of Steve Sas Schwartz, Carlo McCormick, High Times, February 1992

As our own age spirals down into its terminal point of ultimate, final closure, our culture now marks its time – its passing – with the aesthetic self-conception and construction of its future tomb.  The 1990s have become the millennium burial site for an age that once was, but is now rapidly receding; an epoch of modern industry, art and invention that has come to collapse in upon itself.

Steve Sas Schwartz’s paintings – vistas of isolation, desolation, exhaustion and malignant mutation borne out in the darkest extremes of our post-evolutionary humanist remission – cull the latent images from a natural world that’s not so much physically extinct as it is psychically obsolete.  At once a harkening back to the potent ancient archetypes that are buried deep within our collective unconscious, and a living witness to the atrocities yet

to be experienced in the future, Schwartz’s paintings are each contained within gravestone-like borders whose iconography is drawn directly from the mythical and mystical symbols of mankind’s prehistoric and even pre-linguistic primal inheritance.

Also included in this months’s High Art are some of the graphic designs from Skate NYC, a skateboard and skate apparel manufacturing and merchandising company started and operated by Schwartz.  Like his paintings, Schwartz’s skate work has the vitality and power of a kind of post-modern folk art.  Captivated by the energy and style of skate culture as a populist medium of expression – a daily performance art of the streets – Schwartz has continued to expand beyond the narrow realm of fine art to explore the radical visual possibilities of the skate medium as a sort of urban-youth, conceptual-art hybrid.