Pieter Schoolwerth

In his first solo exhibition in France, Pieter Schoolwerth further refines his adaptations of old-master canvases, reworkings that function neither as critique nor as parody but as raw material for an investigation of the possibilities of figurative painting. Each of Schoolwerth’s “portraits” condenses an iconic composition with multiple subjects—mostly genre scenes or religious narratives, like Georges de la Tour’s Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, 1635, or Giovanni Biliverti’s The Archangel Refuses Tobias’s Offerings, 1612––into a single hybrid mass of bravura paint-handling against a matte monochrome background.

One strategy for looking at these paintings is cued by the gallery’s display of Schoolwerth’s studies for each portrait—transparent acetate sheets about eighteen inches square, on which the artist has traced the composition of the source canvas in colored marker, cut out the figures like clear plastic dolls, superimposed them into one reconfigured mass, and taped them onto white paper. In the acetate preparatory sheet for the Biliverti painting, one sees the silhouetted legs of Tobias removed from the right side of the composition and slid under the awning of the angel’s wings at left—closing the narrative circuit, enmeshing the supplicant and the supplicated in one contorted body. But if one impulse is to utilize these X-rays, so to speak, to see the regrafted bones within the hybrid creature, ultimately the stronger pull is to linger over its flesh. The ostentatious illusionism of old-master works—the glint of a crystal goblet painted, it seems, with an ice pick, or a meltingly tactile fur collar—and their dramas of martyrdom, vanity, and devotion are neither deflated nor lampooned, but rather displaced into the paint itself. The detailed stitch work of an embroidered surface is alive in a dry, broken-up skid of pigment; the drama of a coded hand gesture—a divination, a benediction, a theft—now comes from the wet, sand-colored swoop of the hand that executes it.