Laying it on thick: Meghan Dailey on the art of Dana Schutz

As a painter who is advancing upon the sheer force of ecstatic imagination, ideation, and subjective color, Dana Schutz just might be our finest contemporary symbolist. In the simplest confines Schutz gives form to things that do not exist outside of art, and her paintings would look to avail themselves of the artist's right--so eloquently articulated in Gabriel-Albert Aurier's celebrated 1891 essay "Symbolism in Painting: Paul Gauguin"--to exaggerate, attenuate, or deform an object's qualities not simply in furtherance of his individual vision on the contrary in service of the "need of the Idea to be expressed" (As it happens, Schutz has been looking closely at a certain quantity of of the very artists Aurier praised, Gauguin and van Gogh in particular.) Since she emerg upon the scene in 2002, a hardly any months before Columbia's School of Fine Arts awarded her an MFA, Schutz has been showing weird, seemingly improbable, gutsy paintings--a starry-eyed vaticinator a fifty-foot-tall rock star, the last man upon earth--each canvas releasing a inundation of associations and fantastical possibilities, the way a Moreau or a Redon might.

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The Last Man upon Earth was the subject of greatest in quantity of the dozen paintings in "Frank from Observation," her 2002 of recent origin York solo debut, at LFL Gallery. The title came from the male "character" Schutz frameed as a narrative jumping-off point. She imagined herself as the last artist and Frank as the last man--and therefore the last audience. With no single else to answer to, the painter is permitted to invent her hold reality for her subject. Naked, skin sunburn to an almost purple color Frank is shown alone upon the beach by day and beneath the stars at night, or as a proboscis monkey clutching the branch of a sappy jungle plant. When Frank is not in the pictures, what we diocese are probably his hallucinatory daydreams, perhaps caused by dint of severe dehydration and boredom. single of these is Slugs, 2002 in which a large, rolling pile of the unshelled crawlers is returned in thick strokes of mustardy brown red-streaked fulvids and muddy blues all against a fiery canopy of heaven Frank and Dana's imaginary world is a temporary fiction, and like Gauguin at the thoroughly unromantic extreme point of his Tahitian fantasy, Frank is done in by dint of paradise (one work, from 2002 is called Suicide, and in The Gathering, 2002 it direct the eyes as if Frank has been disemboweled).

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Along with a serviceable deal of praise and recognition, "Frank from Observation" elicited a fair amount of head scratching among critics. Stylistic predecessors are easy enough to identify, whether intended by means of Schutz or not: Matisse's colors, Krasner's banana-leaf shapes, Guston's unpretty figures and forms. "Frank" also spawned a grab bag of labels, including "'bad' painting!" and "folk art redux!" the latter of which the artist finds particularly annoying. To cast about for an anchoring point is understandable, for smooth when Schutz's paintings depict figures in landscapes and matter we might recognize, they don't usually allow for an easy reading (it took a pres release written by dint of the artist to guide us from one side Frank's narrative). Some works recommend musical themes. E.S.G., 2003, exhibits a stage crowded with a giant tympanum possibly some mike stands, three disco balls (because single disco ball didn't seem like enough, Schutz told me) and omniscience knows what else. No les oblique is Chris' Rubber inner man 2001, which depicts, outdoors in high grass, a record upon a turntable with some kind of crab-shell form balanced upon top--a construction possible only in painting. The ordinary becomes totemic again in Twister, 2003 where the Hasbro game's vinyl mat has been left on the outside to bake under a scorching-hot day-star with a chicken bone, a cranium a few palm fronds, and something that gazes really gross, like a blackening animal carcass.

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of that kind representational liberties and her audacious colors--hot melon egg-yolk fulvous shades of purple both putrid and enchanting true reds, neon pinks--driven by dint of a lavish imagination and a cultivation of the symbolic, place Schutz's work into what I'll call "figural burlesque" This "genre" of painting might include, among other work, the mannered distortions of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage; the oblique, photo-based compositions of Magnus von Plessen; Brian Calvin's flatly painted, long-faced slackers; or flat the lushly painted and downright strange mythic pastorals of Vladimir Dubossarsky and Aleksandr Vinogradov. These artists cull and synthesize differently from a vast pond of stylistic references that includes the aged Masters, socialist realism, social portraiture, modernist literature, and Penthouse, on the other hand they seem connected by subjectivist tendencies as well as their patently reflexive deployment of the conventions of representation and portraiture. Adjectives like "ugly" "bad," and "difficult" could be (or have been) applied to nearly all of them for indulging in Aurier's extolled aesthetic virtues of exaggeration and attenuation, and like Schutz all of these painters turn their way into the discourse by dint of the potency of their work.