Thoughts That Cure Radically: Dana Schutz 'Piano in the Rain' Friedrich Petzel Gallery

Dana Schutz's career and critical reputation has survived the 2008 financial implosion. Unlike the artists from the 1980s whose white hot careers came to be associated with the over-hyped go-go Reaganomics that the era's art market indulged, Dana Schutz's large, jazzy paintings do not seem to carry the taint of Bush era decadence. Coming out of Columbia's M.F.A. in the early 2000s and entering a smithy furnace of moneyed expenditure, Schutz, then still in her twenties, enjoyed phenomenal critical and market success with her previous dealer Zack Feaur. Given the astronomical climb of her work's estimation, a natural decline of repute and value would seemed to have followed in the wake of the recession. Instead of overproducing and over saturating the market, however, Schutz maintained a steady pace of production and focused over the last few years, perhaps a little prematurely, on mini-museum retrospectives. Older and still intact, Schutz's first solo show with her new bluer chip gallery, Friedrich Petzel, affords an opportunity to see the young painter shorn of the bright glare of overnight success and perhaps, as nearly as possible, objectively.

Schutz's new exhibition, 'Piano in the Rain', employs bohemian images of decadence and boredom. Heroin addicts, brightly colored figures yawning, cramped apartment dwellers, romantic piano players who continue to perform in the rain, are all apart of Schutz's cast of comic characters. Schutz's gauchely lit universe is constantly on the verge of anarchy, visual and otherwise. Skirting disaster is a mark of ambition, of which Schutz's paintings demonstrably contain. 'Building the Boat While Sailing' (all paintings from 2012) is an example of Schutz's compositional determination. Grandly scaled at ten by thirteen feet, this large, catastrophic painting is Schutz's homage to and competition with Gericault's Raft of the Medusa. 'Cramped Apartment' is not as large and shows a young couple fretting in their small, cluttered home. 'Heroin in the Wind', meanwhile, depicts a young person injecting the drug into their arm in the middle of what appears to be a tornado.

A viewer coming upon Schutz's painting for the first time will be struck by their color. Schutz's gift as a colorist is immediate and genuine. 'Yellow Yawner' especially has a compelling juxtaposition of warm yellows and activated purples. 'Heroin in the Wind', despite its abject subject matter, is a tornado of fuchsias, purples and reds. Schutz's paintings are held together by their color and narrative. Given that all the paintings--some of which are gigantic-- where made in the last four months, the surface can feel perfunctory and filled in. Regardless, Schutz's ambition for her painting is evident. Gericault's subject matter of decadence, isolation and anxiety prefigures Schutz's. Plasma colors and frogman figures update Gericault's madwoman or shipwrecked passengers into a contemporary painting idiom. Thematically Schutz has mapped out a career's worth of material. Brazen, sloppy and charged, Schutz's paintings are beginning to follow through on their promise.