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

As a painter who is advancing on the sheer force of ecstatic imagination, ideation, and subjective color, Dana Schutz just might be our finest contemporary symbolist. In the simplest terms, Schutz gives form to things that do not exist outside of art, and her paintings would seem 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 merely in furtherance of his individual vision but in service of the "needs of the Idea to be expressed." (As it happens, Schutz has been looking closely at some of the very artists Aurier praised, Gauguin and van Gogh in particular.) Since she emerged on the scene in 2002, a few months before Columbia's School of Fine Arts awarded her an MFA, Schutz has been showing weird, seemingly improbable, gutsy paintings--a starry-eyed seer, a fifty-foot-tall rock star, the last man on earth--each canvas releasing a flood of associations and fantastical possibilities, the way a Moreau or a Redon might.

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The Last Man on Earth was the subject of most of the dozen paintings in "Frank from Observation," her 2002 New York solo debut, at LFL Gallery. The title came from the male "character" Schutz concocted 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 one else to answer to, the painter is permitted to invent her own reality for her subject. Naked, skin sunburned to an almost purple hue, Frank is shown alone on the beach by day and beneath the stars at night, or as a proboscis monkey, clutching the branch of a succulent jungle plant. When Frank is not in the pictures, what we see are probably his hallucinatory daydreams, perhaps caused by severe dehydration and boredom. One of these is Slugs, 2002, in which a large, rolling pile of the unshelled crawlers is rendered in thick strokes of mustardy browns, red-streaked yellows, and muddy blues all against a fiery sky. Frank and Dana's imaginary world is a temporary fiction, and like Gauguin at the thoroughly unromantic end of his Tahitian fantasy, Frank is done in by paradise (one work, from 2002, is called Suicide, and in The Gathering, 2002, it looks as if Frank has been disemboweled).

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Along with a good 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 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 even when Schutz's paintings depict figures in landscapes and stuff we might recognize, they don't usually allow for an easy reading (it took a press release written by the artist to guide us through Frank's narrative). Some works suggest musical themes. E.S.G., 2003, shows a stage crowded with a giant drum, possibly some mike stands, three disco balls (because one disco ball didn't seem like enough, Schutz told me), and God knows what else. No less oblique is Chris' Rubber Soul, 2001, which depicts, outdoors in high grass, a record on a turntable with some kind of crab-shell form balanced on 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 out to bake under a scorching-hot sun with a chicken bone, a skull, a few palm fronds, and something that looks really gross, like a blackening animal carcass.

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Such representational liberties and her audacious colors--hot melon, egg-yolk yellow, shades of purple both putrid and lovely, true reds, neon pinks--driven by 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 even the lushly painted and downright strange mythic pastorals of Vladimir Dubossarsky and Aleksandr Vinogradov. These artists select and synthesize differently from a vast pool of stylistic references that includes the Old Masters, socialist realism, social portraiture, modernist literature, and Penthouse, but 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 elbow their way into the discourse by the potency of their work.