ARTISTS
DAVID SCHUTTER
SELECTED PRESS
David Schutter, Chicago, Art Papers, 2007
David Schutter’s project is decidedly old fashioned: he paints scenes based in observation. Past works have included textured, barely discernable gray-hued still lifes more concerned with capturing something like the trace of objects than with clear descriptive documentation. These paintings display signs of much revision and we paint working into wet paint, thus capturing Schutter’s studious process. The canvas’ surface reads as a meeting between eye, mind, and hand. In this respect, Schutter’s most contemporaneous references might be the long-gone artists Giacometti or Morandi- models for the value of constant revision and return. His recent project looks even farther back. Shown in two locations, these paintings after works from Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie [Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery; March 1—April 21, 2007 / Museum of Contemporary Art; March 3—April 1, 2007]. What’s more, Schutter painted them during a 2006 residency in Berlin, where he also made observational drawings of paintings by Gerard ter Boch, Franz Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Johannes Vermeer. He later worked on new paintings that are attempts to remake the original masterworks. In all this, Schutter’s process is resolutely conventional—a genuine return to a philosophical notion of painting’s practice.
One constant remains. Scumbled and weathered beyond recognizable details whether it is a still life or a history painting, each work arrives at a motley assortment of grays as Schutter reworks colors and forms past the veracities of observation, memory or documentation. What remains is trace and faint, at times serene, at times agitated. Similarity ends here, however. Schutter’s still life paintings are old fashioned in a very different way from his paintings after historical works. To paint the action of looking and resolving our understanding with the world upon objects belies attention to the things with which we lives our lives. But to paint the action of looking and resolving our understanding with the world upon painting from the past belies attention to the methodologies on which we build our customs. What does it say that, when displayed together without originals, the paintings after works from the Gemäldegalerie are basically illegible?
The opaque gray surfaces display an amazing array of variation and specificity, but not of the sort that places us back in any particular painting by Hals, Rembrandt or Vermeer. Looking for traces of old master paintings in Schutter’s remakes, we notice historical distance and the absurdity of our ineffectual attempts to recall history’s forms. This is most clearly at work in the twenty drawings related to Schutter’s painting of Rembrandt’s Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife. These are neither preparatory drawings nor sketches that reveal the structure of Rembrandt’s composition. They are small, brutal thoughts. Created while he was working on his painting. Schutter used the drawings as concentrated moments in order to release the tension inhibiting or interfering with his attempt to recall the original painting. As such, the twenty drawings concretely demonstrate that, while modern gestures may be built from history, they no longer perform as they did historically. Rather than a nihilistic endgame or a refutation of history, Schutter crafts memento mori to capture the distance between what was and what is. We may not be able to recapture what was, but this doesn’t mean that we don’t need to capture.
Anthony Elms