Jeffrey Kastner on Pieter Schoolwerth

With a temper that always suggests a trippy twenty-first-century recapitulation of Richard Hamilton’s iconic 1956 proto-Pop collage Simply what’s it that makes right this moment’s houses so completely different, so interesting?, Pieter Schoolwerth’s latest works suggest a world swollen to the purpose of disfigurement with the flotsam and jetsam of the capitalist now. The consumerist heartache on the core of Hamilton’s sardonic dream residence was based on a welter of newfangled home equipment, product logos, and hypertrophically idealized female and male varieties. For his or her half, Schoolwerth’s virtuoso work swarm with low-budget merchandise hailing from the digital realm—digital our bodies and settings purchased off business CGI marketplaces equivalent to TurboSquid after which subjected to an array of deformations that disorientingly toggle, like a lot of our up to date picture sphere, between the repellent and the mesmerizing, the humorous and the ominous.

“Rigged,” Schoolwerth’s present at Petzel’s East Sixty-Seventh Avenue area in Manhattan, took its identify from the “rig,” i.e., that infrastructural factor of a digitally rendered physique (successfully its skeleton) onto which the determine’s outward look is connected. When the floor type, or “mesh,” is dislocated from the underlying armature, derigged varieties will be made to wobble and soften nonetheless the operator needs. Massive and strategically chaotic of their compositions, Schoolwerth’s work usually concentrate on ensembles of those gloppily contorted our bodies interacting in spatiotemporally garbled environments, every factor translated from its algorithmic origin to the canvas with a mixture of media and gesture—passages of boldly impastoed acrylic, flatly brushed oil paint, and photographic ink-jet imagery. Variously torqued and liquefied; pixelated and polyhedral; clear, stretched, break up, and slumped; disaggregated and absorbent, these “poor photographs” are despatched out into the world to stroll a perilously strung tightrope. Although they’re clearly impoverished—their psychophysical integrity completely demolished—they’re additionally liberated from the corporeal logic of their extra standard functions. Thus emancipated, they’re free to embody the instabilities that form intersubjectivity in our epoch of simulation, dispersion, and ever extra etiolated modes of presence.

The eight work and half-dozen quick, looped NFT animations (produced collaboratively with Philip Vanderhyden and that includes sound by Aaron Dilloway) on view, all from 2022, had been giddy of their narrative incoherence, depicting scenes as perpendicular to actuality because the solid of creepily artificial components that populated them. Schoolwerth has been working on this basic vein because the mid-2000s, however this latest suite ups the ante significantly, and any try to explain what’s happening in a given picture shortly runs up in opposition to the perplexities of the artist’s berserk compositions and their puzzle-like unrealities. In Unicorn Touchdown Web page Actual Property (Rigged #16), as an illustration, a gaggle of what initially seems to be 5 figures collect alongside a perspectivally inconceivable beachfront, although nearer inspection reveals that the crew in truth consists of simply three our bodies. One lounges in a chair Mad Males type with a cig in his geometrically unfinished hand, whereas the remaining 4 are literally simply two entities and their shadow twins, a pair of supply photographs which have every been duplicated after which radically altered. (This accounting doesn’t, in fact, embrace the titular legendary animal that rears within the middle of the work, its cover lined with a distorted human face like a bizarre faunal car wrap.) The entire thing has the texture of a script for some type of light-beer business fed right into a faulty AI with the specific objective of inflicting a system error.

Some works appear organized round barely extra legible classes of conduct: Jungle Zoom (Rigged #6), for instance, proposes a type of ménage à trois (quatre? cinq?) wherein a gaggle of taffy-like our bodies fade out and in of presence, participating in numerous coital mergings for which genitalia appear completely elective. However most can’t be parsed with any diploma of narrative granularity, and are reasonably designed to operate primarily as cautionary examples of the metaverse’s collective dangerous journey into the depths of the uncanny valley. Each painted picture is, in fact, a fiction and a phantom, however in that zone the place resemblance threatens alternative and digital identicality consistently slips simply sufficient out of sync to open up a chasm to revulsion, Schoolwerth conjures an much more monstrous contemporaneity, gesturing towards simply what it’s that makes our personal current day so completely different, so appalling.

— Jeffrey Kastner