The paintings look painfully modernist, if not formalist. While the influence of historical paintings is prominent in the artist’s practice, it does not register as such to the viewer-not without outside knowledge of his subject. Apparently, the crux of Schutter’s practice is “the encounter both bodily and cerebral with historical things whose allegories may have been lost with time, yet whose surfaces yield new problems and pleasures in equal measure.” Schutter’s discipline certainly returns to something in the historical paintings. The exhibition is described as “exploring the contemporary life of historical painting.” It turns out that Schutter’s paintings are based on a collection by a 19th-century French landscape painter. The UChicago Arts online description of Rendition implies that one needs background knowledge to appreciate its essence. The color, again, points to the artist’s labor, if not his gesture. Curiously, they also wear a veneer of metallic sheen, appearing at once smoothly lustrous and grittily industrial. His colors are often a hybrid of hues, masked beneath a veil of dirty grey, making them difficult to identify immediately. As murky and amorphous as the colors are, they have a kind of finicky, precise quality-one could imagine Schutter fretting over his color palette and laboring away to achieve the right mixture of pigment. The process of looking at the painting is also a process of constant guessing: How does Schutter achieve this kind of effect? The phantom presence of his hand’s touch on these paintings is acutely felt. When viewed together, they also index a range of gestures: touch, brush, smudge, smear, and so on. Though widely different in size, they share the same color palette-predominantly dark grey, mixed with muted red, blue, and green. They tackle the theme of rendition by calling attention to the presence of the artist’s hand. The four paintings that hang in the giant cubicle are even more cerebral. Both aspects of the work-that it can call attention to its own condition of being seen, as well as its own physical being-can fall under the umbrella term “rendition.” Schutter is so skilled at depicting the painting in a lifelike manner that the viewer may be tricked into believing that a real painting is encased in the frame-in this sense, the drawing functions as a trompe-l’oeil. It is also a picture of a picture, making it an entirely self-conscious work. On one level, it references the act of viewing by mimicking what one would see upon walking into a gallery and catching sight of a painting.
![frame subsume frame subsume](https://i.imgur.com/ta44yEQ.jpg)
This is as blatantly self-referential as a drawing can get.
FRAME SUBSUME SERIES
It is the only representational work in this series its subject matter is a painting viewed in three-quarter profile. The wood-framed drawing is a delectable appetizer for the show. You’ll likely get more out of the exhibition bearing the following in mind: The “rendering” itself is more important than that “something.”
![frame subsume frame subsume](https://i.redd.it/56iuumm6lzj51.jpg)
These works are mostly abstract, but the title Rendition gives solid instructions for how the exhibit should be interpreted. Inside the chamber hangs a wood-framed drawing inside the cubicle hang four oil paintings of grey-toned colors. Upon entering the gallery, one sees an amply lit chamber on the left and a monolithic white cubicle jutting out on the right. A “rendition,” simply put, is the act of making or interpreting. David Schutter’s current exhibition at the Logan Center, Rendition, could not be more aptly titled.