Dense Fictions

When a society enters its decadent phase, as ours has, it eventually reaches a zero point at which every subparticle of each social component, each molecule, must be dissasmbled and analyzed in order to reconstitute an image of reality. At this point we enter “The Politics of Reality.” Reality is up for grabs. The ball is loose and each molecule is roaming free .

Jonathan Lasker, "Paint's Body", Complete Essays 1984-1998,New York: Edewise Press, 1998, p.39

Galeria Marta Cervera is pleased to announce the opening, on Saturday, November 15th, of Lasker / Schoolwerth, Dense Fictions, an exhibition that brings together the work of two New York based painters from different generations.

Taking the above citation and incisive observation by Jonathan Lasker as a starting point, as an aid to engaging with the visually intense and arresting paintings on display in this exhibition, could prove beneficial to the viewer. One might wish to follow the internal logic of this statement from the early 1990s further and assert that Lasker has spent the last forty years of his remarkable career alluding to and adapting its various meanings to his chosen medium of painting, isolating, questioning, liberating and re-combining its basic constitutive components — such as ground, drawing, form, color, and the material of paint itself — to produce some of the most daring and inventive work his generation of painters has brought to fruition.

Pieter Schoolwerth, for his part, has considered and admired Lasker’s paintings for many years. The older of the two artists has been a source of inspiration for the younger, but it is to a more external, though related set of issues of the image that Schoolwerth has attempted to explore solutions for. The raw materials he wrestles with could be described as the various regimes of the image we exist within and their destabilizing effects on the fondamental issue of representation of the body in painting. Alongside the categories of painting and drawing themselves, subject matter for Schoolwerth derives from the history of painting, photography, the television image, advertizing, the digitization of all aspects of life, as well as the internet’s compression and elongation of time and space. They all come to influence and fragment our self-image, and by extention must be part of the real content of any attempt at portraiture. For Schoolwerth, the invisible forces of abstraction that fuel the pulverization of contemporary experience must first be identified, captured, and turned into palpable subject matter for the compositional efforts of the painter. In the process, the quasi-ancient and forgotten forces of discursivity and composition re-emerge as active and objective operators in the ambitious work of these two artists, situated at the polar opposite of the detached and ironic endgames of much New York painting today.

*The exhibition’s title is borrowed from a 1984 text by Jonathan Lasker first published in Effects: Magazine for New Art Theory.