TONY WIGHT GALLERY

EXHIBITIONS

DAVID SCHUTTER, Repertory

November 21, 2008 - January 3, 2009

Tony Wight Gallery is pleased to announce Repertory, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by David Schutter. This will be Schutter’s third solo presentation with Tony Wight Gallery.

A group of ten cloud studies painted by 19th Century English artist John Constable, in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, serve as the source of Schutter’s new project. For Constable, the sky was the critical nexus of landscape. Making these cloud studies— some of which have no foreground elements and are pure sky paintings— Constable sought to record a natural ephemera indicative of the fugitive states found in perception, as well as more empirically grounded meditations on time, space, climate, and painterly effects. Constable’s practice of painting cloud studies is not an effort to develop a series of finished works, but instead a working philosophical repertory to which he repeatedly returned to use as aid memoires. His cloud studies evoke the immediacy of perception, but also the practitioner’s act of rehearsal.

Constable’s biographer C.R. Leslie notes the artist saying, “When I sit down to make a sketch from nature the first thing I try to do is forget that I have ever seen a picture.” It is then remarkable that Constable devoted much time and effort to extensively copy clouds from an artist handbook produced by the 18th Century landscape painter Alexander Cozens. This done in tandem with his field studies of clouds in plein air is a telling contradiction. It is not to say that Constable was unfaithful to his doctrine of painting as a Natural Science and direct experience, but that he needed Cozens’ schemata to align ephemera, knowledge, and practice.

David Schutter’s project systematically confronts such paradoxes, using Constable’s clouds as a schematic foil for the study of painting in its Meta-sense. Having intently studied the YCBA works through drawings, notes, and archival research, Schutter has “re-made” two versions of each of the 10 cloud study paintings in a 1-to-1 scale with like materials. As he began the actual painting portion of the project, Schutter set aside all of the accumulated supportive data. This gesture is less to provoke a test of memory than it is a phenomenological study that discusses the distances of such endeavors and the hypotheticals one must construct to make things, particularly in the historical field of painting. Re-making the paintings from the surface regards them as anterior objects and speaks of reproduction as a form of engagement with the historicity of our contemporary situation. Schutter’s paintings made after the Constables are as much performative re-enactments as they are discreet paintings, and as such are a repertory of rehearsals that consider the problem of painting.

The exhibition is divided into two rooms. In the main gallery Schutter has installed a free-standing wall measuring the same dimensions as the wall in the YCBA on which the Constables currently hang. The two versions of Schutter’s paintings are installed on either side of the wall in the Salon-style configuration designed by the YCBA. In the rear gallery are drawings made after the completion of the paintings. These delicate graphite on vellum drawings are depositories for the few remaining marks, tics, and gestures at the end of his lengthy painting process, and serve as a final emptying out of the accumulated Constable data.

David Schutter (American, b. 1974) has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Sight Threads, Sense Threads at Aurel Scheibler, Berlin; Afterpaintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. In 2009, Schutter will be featured in a two-person exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and will execute a solo installation project at the National Gallery, Scotland. Tony Wight Gallery is publishing a forthcoming catalogue of Repertory with texts by Angus Trumble, Shamim M. Momin, and Ara Merjian in conversation with Matthew Jesse Jackson.