New paintings. In distinction to his earlier work, which exclusively submitted paint to its pre-modern function as the medium of rendering, the artist now inscribes some of the medium's inherent attributes directly into the scenes themselves.
New paintings
"While the visual dimension in art, considered as an epistemological
category of the pursuit of truth, continues its slow retreat, Pieter
Schoolwerth advances his full-blown, maximalist attempt at figuring and
representing contemporary life and the forces of abstraction that shape it
one step at a time. While many artists, confronted with the confusion of an
over-saturated image culture, might choose to operate from the perspective
of the private sphere, Schoolwerth keeps engaging the complexities and
perplexities of what he sees out there through the vital energy of what he
has in him; and painting as such is coming more and more to the rescue.
Part of the excitement provoked by such an all-out endeavor, and, perhaps, a
good measure of its ambition, is that it initially grounds the viewer into
familiar territory: a couple in a therapy session, a family scene at the
dinner table, a juicy hamburger here, an oversized mobile telephone there.
Anchored in these basic settings and situations, the paintings unfold their
wide array of erotic sense effects, ranging from the painterly to the
semiotic, from the beautiful to the literally monstrous.
In distinction to his earlier work, which exclusively submitted paint to its
pre-modern function as the medium of rendering, Schoolwerth now inscribes
some of the medium's inherent attributes directly into the scenes
themselves. In Couple, for instance, the woman's right arm turns into an
armature of thick paint in sharp contrast to her emerging hand and the
detailed features of her face. In Family, the father's white shirt does
nothing but trace the sinuous paths of a wide brush. And the contours of
the child's body in the foreground disappear into a swirl of brown. None of
these effects, however, can be strictly described as abstract or
expressionistic inasmuch as they contribute to perform the layers of
narrative in the picture. Paint disfigures and redoubles the husband's face
in Couple and allows him to look back at himself simply because having to
confront the horror of oneself, so they say, is a crucial aspect of therapy.
Such motivated readings of the action are possible, but they are surrounded
by areas of far less obvious meaning, where the stuff of paint, in tune with
its modernist potential, loses its narrative purpose and takes on a life of
its own. The play of give and take between these two modes of appearance
make up the pulse of the image as it reveals itself.
Forceful as it remains, the wild and often hilarious dance of signs in these
new compositions has become less overheated and more assured as it
encounters the gravitational pull of paint's material qualities. The
dynamic structure of the image benefits from this added dose of realism as
it assimilates often close to unimaginable distortions of time, space, and
form.
If for Schoolwerth painting has to do first and foremost with observing the
world, seeing is the result of liberating and enhancing specific forces in
the image in order to find ways to actually depict the invisible in action.
And the work of the invisible takes place in the world as much as it looms
in the artist's mind. In Session, the father figure who appears in all the
paintings in the exhibition tightens his necktie as his body merges into a
fan. In turn, the fan projects a diagonal shaft of air and light through
the orgiastic event and spills the contents of male fantasies onto a round
mirror above the bed.
In more general terms, the artist does not shy away from the task of
depicting the tasteless things of our consumer society. He even deems it
both an uneasy duty and a reality test. The effort consists of an oblique
celebration in which every element in the painting is presented in its
separated, quasi-generic state before entering into a precarious and
experimental relation with the other elements around it. As a consequence,
the picture is always in the process of battling to produce itself before
our eyes. Things can go right and things do go wrong indeed, depending on
what you see and for what harmonies you might be looking. Therein lies the
unsettling life-force of Schoolwerth's work."
This is Pieter Schoolwerth's second solo show at Elizabeth Dee, and his
sixth in New York. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Centre
national d'art Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Aldrich Contemporary Art
Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and the ICA in Boston, and written about
in The New York Times, Flash Art, Time Out New York, and V Magazine. The
artist lives and works in Brooklyn.
Opening: on Saturday, October 8, from six to eight pm.
Elizabeth Dee Gallery
545 West 20th Street. - New York