The Brooklyn Rail

Shaunté Gates’s new series of paintings In light of the Hunt is Rubenesque. Gates’s stories are told at the intersection of the mythological and the political with dizzying composition and at the point of maximum energy: immersive and baroque works. Like Rubens, Gates plucks real-world figures, in this case his own circle of friends and acquaintances, and dresses them in a fanciful couture residing somewhere between armor and sportsgear. He places these figures in a fictional context dripping with political allegory. Gates has used the storyline of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now as a backdrop for the depiction of his character’s undisclosed trials, but while the characters in the 1979 movie are merely the crew of a patrol boat, Gates elevates his figures to singular heroes. In Cobalt is Red, Poppies Are Too (all works 2023) the protagonist struggles upstream, aided or possibly thwarted by two other figures, one a horned dog. The protagonist wears an approximation of a centurion’s helmet, crafted from a Giants (the NY football team) helmet, a black bird’s wing for a crest, and ear flaps made from a mosaic of pennies. The figure also carries a cracked iphone and a lance repetitively emblazoned with the Bicycle Playing Card logo. The figures and objects are crafted from prints and photographs while the background is swirling watercolor on paper (pulled paper). Gates uses this process again and again, as in Josh and The River and In Light of the Hunt: The Mountain Will Fall II—reproducing a very cinematic crisp detail up close/blurry in the distance effect.

Does this detail amount to anything? Yes, but with the caveat that if one doesn’t take the time to read the canvas, the epic quality still comes through: so is it necessary? Clearly even the choice of Apocalypse Now as a subtext plays on both the colonial narratives of the film, and on Conrad’s text as well, so there is a spiraling tendency of meaning to beget meaning ad infinitum, until we’re not always sure what the artist means. The Four Huntresses III is a good example of keeping it simple—relatively free of corporate logos and brand names, the striking figure of a Black woman transformed into a rearing centaur, against a stormy and chaotic backdrop, speaks volumes.

Gates’s technique captivates the viewer, and one could imagine his remarkable shifts between photographic detail and a painterly gestural background appealing to Rubens as well—who also reveled in perfectly rendered faces placed on writhing expanses of flesh and kaleidoscopic fields of multitudinous textures. The laminated sections of paper on Gates’s canvases are laid down with a purposeful imperfection, creased and wrinkled, and the edges are not flat and are often torn. They add a refreshing abstract counterpoint to the literalness of the collaged images. In The Four Huntresses I, the huntress appears to pitch forward precipitously, while close at her heels is a horse with a golden helmet. Gates has created the helmet from a densely laid down mass of gold painted or gilt paper, buckled like flesh or liquid metal. This otherworldly appliqué amplifies the terror of the beast and the immediacy of the action. Similarly powerful is the use of string, the eternal symbol of the tenuousness of life, which Gates employs in This is Not a Test III: She Found the Great Beauty Where the Flamingos Rest. A blindfolded woman presides over a pandemonious foreground of swathes of lilac and scarlet, and a small flock of crouching flamingos. Across her chest is draped a lonely black string. While the miasma of forms and images presents a confusing sensation of frightening disorder in the state of nature, the blindfolded woman is clearly a vulnerable hybrid of justice and fate, and the lifeline which she oversees is the relatable symbol of the unpredictably knotted life of the figure, or the painter, or possibly the viewer as well.