David Schutter

There can be an aversion to being associated with surface, a fear of superficiality, a wanting for depth. David Schutter, however, has spent the better part of his painting career fixated on this very space, reminding us that surface is a distance to be traveled. His persistent—and in his words, forensic—return to surface as a stage gives way to a local, heightened elasticity. Confronting his paintings is an invitation to be present and to search for traces of the performance we sense was afoot. In his newest exhibition, Night Work, at Verein by Association in Zurich, Schutter takes on the role of nocturnal painter, leading us through five studies after Adolph Menzel, created during evening hours in as many years.

—Melissa Joseph

Melissa Joseph

I’ve mostly heard you talk about your work in real time, but I’m interested in the generation of your painting practice. Do you mind sharing a little bit about how you started down this path of painting from paintings?

David Schutter

It’s almost twenty years since I started doing this, which is hard to believe. The training I had as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the early 1990s was pretty much untouched from the 1880s. In graduate school I really started to question that training and those histories. I know that it’s impossible to return to anything—innocence, previous forms of knowledge, nature, and so on—but I got this idea that I wanted to start painting again, to sort of begin with a very simple picture. I started to work from the still-life motif, and I worked within the arena of the square to conjure up an image of something. I wasn’t working from observation. I was just trying to take a canvas and set something into it that looked like a thing. I went to painting as the source, as opposed to nature, partly because I was so connected to painting at the time—its continuity, its history, seeing as painting.

The first thing I tried to paint was an artichoke. I thought it was a complex object; it had a repeated form; it was something I found beautiful. It got reduced really quickly with that first painting in 2002; I mean the formal reduction. I started with a basic nineteenth-century academic palette, and things started to close down. Shapes started to fold; forms started to collapse. The only way to control it was to work within this kind of dough that I could shape and reshape, and that ended up being a reduced gray. I did this for a couple of years until it started to feel like a magic trick that I couldn’t control.

The doubts I had were starting to magnify. I wasn’t believing in the forms anymore. I’d start painting an artichoke, and then it would turn into a rabbit or a pile of chestnuts. When I got tired of that, I thought, Maybe if I focus on an actual painting as the model instead of trying to come up with the form, the arena will be already decided for me, like the dimensions and the materials. And then I’ll try and study that painting, basically working in étude.

Which painting did you start with?

I was in Berlin so I chose a handful of pictures at the Gemäldegalerie and started to work with them.

Was your palette solidifying?

More or less. I picked a general palette. At that time, all the paintings I was working with were seventeenth-century Dutch. It was a basic Rembrandt-era palette. When people say my paintings are monochromes, I always say they’re not because they’re made chromatically. I’m cross-mixing reds and greens and blues and siennas.

And you continue to use the palettes of the artists you’re painting after?

Yes, it can be really exhilarating to give oneself over to another hand and another way of making.

That actually leads to something else I was thinking about which is the performative element of your work—or that I read as performative. Do you relate to that word?

I think of it as a repertory performance in painting. I consider rendering an image and a material that’s already here as working within a repertory of painting. I’m really not looking to interpret it. That’s one thing I really do my best to try and set aside. I find comfort in the discomfort of not being oneself. I know it’s a fantasy, but I try to set aside expressive tendencies and to engage with the surface of things and then try to find the nuances of those performances which are found within the paintings themselves. I look at paintings as if they’re happening in time. I can look at a Jean-Antoine Watteau and see it unfold; I see it in acts.

When did Menzel appear in the repertory?

For documenta 14 I was asked to take on the very troublesome Gurlitt art trove discovered in Munich and Salzburg in 2013. I applied my way of working forensically to its contents by selecting drawings made by Max Liebermann and rendering them with his black chalk and pencil on a paper reconstructed from the same nineteenth-century cellulose found in his own sketchbook paper. Liebermann’s was the first artwork determined to be Beutekunst and undergo the process of restitution, so he was the locus for me. I saw in Menzel a true antecedent to Liebermann’s mark-making. I started the Menzels as a way to focus on Liebermann, if you can imagine. I picked the night painting Studio Wall (1852) so as to be able to work on Liebermann during the day and Menzel at night. I began to think of it as a kind of B side. I don’t know what his motivation was, but there’s an intimacy to the painting—the last search before the day is over. It isn’t romantic in its engagement with the nocturne. It’s really just trying to show the day and the night as having separate qualities.

That reminds me of a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”: “But there is an influence in the light of morning that tends to rectify whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred during the sun’s decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the less wholesome glow of moonshine.”

What a fine quote.

I’ve been comforted by its qualitative judgment of night and day. But I don’t think that Menzel’s work or your work on these paintings have any allusion to the sinisterness that is sometimes associated with night.

I identify very strongly with that aspect of Menzel. It’s not saturnal, right?

No, but I think it’s a time of day that artists relate to in different ways than many other people.

I think it does change the way that you work. It does change the way that you make a mark. I envy a painter like Philip Guston who would work until three o’clock in the morning, but I don’t work that way. I enjoy the mornings, and I enjoy working until the sun goes down.

I remember asking you before the pandemic how to balance studio and work life. You gave good advice, explaining how much work one can do thinking and writing when not in the studio. Then returning to the studio, one can be more productive with the time. Knowing you had some forced time off due to Covid and moving to Berlin from Chicago, how did it reshape your practice?

It was disrupted in the sense that I was really just shorn from my habits. I am a daily practice painter, and having nowhere to work except for my small apartment rerouted me in a way. I tried to continue looking at things, but I’m really contingent on collections, and everything was closed. I went dormant as far as making went. I was experiencing a complete lack, and that lack bled into daily life. But I read and walked a lot. I did a little bit of writing, and I made a book that came out from the University of Chicago Press on Charles Le Brun.

It’s a terrific book! And then, when you finally got studio access back, did you return with fervor or was it a slow reacclimation?

It was very slow because I had moved from a lockdown in Chicago to a lockdown in Berlin. It took quite a while to get my studio set up. But the Menzels were the thing that brought me out of it. It was the last thing I had really looked at and thought about. I was surprised by the retention of it, almost like a sunspot. Once I started with those, I was able to get going again.

And now you are showing them in Zurich at Adam Szymczyk’s Verein by Association. What is his vision for that project?

He initiated it in 2021 to carry out projects such as exhibitions, publications, talks, and other formats, working outside the commercial structure. He’s really a historian and thinker, so that’s the way that he’s going about making exhibitions. It’s great to be working with him again, and I’m very thankful to his eye, and his trust, and the work we’ve done together.

David Schutter: Night Work is on view at Verein by Association in Zurich until July 9.

Written by Melissa Joseph

BOMB Magazine: David Schutter Interviewed by Melissa Joseph

July 5, 2023