The new series of René Schoemakers' works The Unencumbered Self reflects on the multiple involuntary entanglements of the self and the futile attempts to deny them, using different types of representational orders combined in naturalistic paintings.

At this the naturalistic idiom is the precise opposite of a naive depiction of „what there is“. It is in fact used as a meta-idiom to merge the different levels of representations of our reality. Schoemakers' paintings are striking in terms of their remarkable precision, which calls reminiscence of the old masters, as well as their profoundness . The Unencumbered Self shows radical individualism as a barren kind of individual radicalism.