The Brooklyn Rail

Dana Schutz seems to be on a furious quest to out-Ensor James Ensor. Using one of Aesop’s Fables, the gist of which is that humanity chooses idiocracy over intellect, as a touchstone for her exhibition, the painter has crafted a wondrous spectacle of large and deliciously gooey canvases filled by desperate frenetic figures involved in lively jostling klatches. Heads which metastasize into monstrous Mardi-Gras caricatures or grow threatening bird’s beaks seem to converge around pitifully small tables and beds, even perching on rocky outcroppings. In The Arbiters (2023), a green-eyed man in a button-down shirt and brown jacket vomits a hand which reaches towards a figure pointing didactically upwards. Another figure with a freakishly spherical head smashes a glass with a hammer, while two women sit on either side simply observing—the subject under discussion is less relevant than their clear inability to discuss it sanely.

Schutz incorporates into her canvasses copious details, but the moment of disruption is key, and so we absorb her references and small details in what might be considered—and what I think she is getting at in terms of current politics—in terms of the State of Exception, the concept that fascist factions easily take advantage of political chaos. So in The Arbiters, after all the violent hullabaloo, we then notice that all the characters’ legs dangle from silver rings beneath the table. Is this a puppet show, an historical diorama? In Dear Painter (2023), a mustachioed and determined central figure applies red to a bedridden woman’s lips with a paintbrush while a palette rests on her lap. His bedside manner suggests an attempt to resuscitate the patient via art as a woman in pink, stage right, clings desperately to the model’s wrist. There is humor here, and the excessive drama of a pantomime, Schutz doesn’t want us to get too unsettled—it is only a painting, after all.

The list of painterly references and implications here is endless: Jupiter’s Lottery is late-stage postmodernism at its best. The artist is fascinated by the idea of genre painting, of positioning groups of her macabre lollipop-heads in recognizable formats pulled from the pages of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. We have gatherings around tables as in The Arbiters, but also Table Scene (2022), tableaus that seem to channel the Dutch tradition of Hals and Brouwer. Schutz’s The Face (2023), The Love (2023), and the gargantuan The Gathering (2023) can be aligned with Courbet’s awkward large format figure-in-the-landscape canvases such as La Rencontre (1854) and A Burial at Ornans (1849-50). The Hill (2023), a fanciful and delightful scene of a crowd of six clumsy plein-air painters rendering a hill, but not doing a great job of it, reinterprets Hockney’s interpretation of Claude’s famous Sermon on the Mount (1651–1661). Regardless of the set-up though, the cast is always Schutz.

The luscious brushstrokes of thickly applied oil (still emitting a fragrance that permeates the galleries) which define the sinister features of the painter’s characters are an intersection between caricature and Rorschach test. At times Schutz allows herself to indulge completely in a Guston-ish orgy of glistening ridges of paint, as in the bird’s head of The Walk (2023), and sometimes, Rorschach-like, even the heads melt into indeterminate parti-colored blobs that are largely left for us to figure out. We can see this in The Island (2023), where a towering ring formed of horns and noses, proboscises and various orifices sits tenuously atop a sheep-covered rock emerging from a blood-red sea. Like Daumier in particular, Schutz sees clay as a surrogate for paint. She has pulled the brushstroke and gesture from the encrusted surfaces of her canvas and replicated the endlessly shifting surface in clay sculptural forms, which are eventually transmogrified from clay into bronze. The largest of these, Sea Group (2022) is a three-dimensional embodiment of The Island; it also features a circular grouping of approximate heads and extremities perched on an outcropping far too small to support the number.

Large Model and Odalisque (both 2022) again indulge the artist’s interest in genre, but her painterly distortions now take on a third dimension. Odalisque is a naked model painfully wedged into a narrow triangle, topped with a bird and balanced precipitously on top of a column segment—one of the model’s breasts is wedged tightly against her chin while her leg dangles painfully unsupported at least a foot above the floor. Large Model, in keeping with the indeterminacy of the paintings, is an enigmatically epic figure standing imperiously with hand on hip. The sex is largely indeterminate, until we notice a severed head at the figure’s feet. It’s David and Goliath, via Donatello. Whether puppet-show, nightmarish Ensorian mask parade, or seventeenth-century genre painting, Schutz inevitably finds a good place for her distinctive heads.