What is a painting? What is its relation to perception?, to power?, to tradition?
What does it mean to spend time looking at, or making a painting; to attend to it?
Writing about the artist Thomas Jones in the TLS in 2003, Merlin James asked, “What does it mean to give an accurate, matter-of-fact description of the world, or part of the world, or something in the world? When we try to describe objectively what we perceive in front of us, or around us, to what extent are we giving an account of ourselves – of our own impressions? How do we set limits on what we choose to describe, decide what’s the focus our attention and what is incidental or “background”? How could someone judge the reliability of our account, without recourse to that part of reality it purports to record (yet why make a “copy” of appearance at all, if not in anticipation of the absence of the original)?”1
David Schutter is a painter living and working in Berlin. His practice is based on the close study of carefully selected Old Master paintings, taking into account every aspect of the original work, including its composition, the pigments used in its manufacture, and its historical context. (Recent examples, including the one in this exhibition which is after a small painting of seaside dunes by Jacob van Ruisdael, consider ‘landscape’ as a historical form associated since the seventeenth century with the expansion of European capital and imperial power.) From memory Schutter ‘re-makes’ the source painting to its original scale using all the information he now has at hand. His paintings become performative re-enactments of their sources. Schutter considers his process to be one, not of recollection, but of repetition; a repetition of seeing and a repetition of painting. One of the questions his work asks is how do you situate the past in the space of the present?, especially when the past is a contested landscape. Schutter is clear that he does not want his paintings to be read as speaking of some kind of loss in the reactionary sense of an attempt to return. In many ways his work speaks of the fact that the past can’t be returned to. There is a melancholy here, but this not endgame painting. Instead something about “making” is revealed.
Michele Tocca is a painter living and working in Rome. His paintings in this exhibition are depictions of remaining sections of that city’s ancient Aurelian Wall made on site in one sitting in whatever conditions were pertaining at the time. They are in the tradition of the oil sketch which originated in Italy in the sixteenth century and had, by the end of the eighteenth, become an established part of an artist’s repertoire. The oil sketch encouraged the direct observation and recording of nature and the taking of notes of its particular details. Its virtues were seen to lie in its precise admixture of artifice and nature, its delicate interrogation of medium, its teasing equation of painterly and perceptual presence, of the artist’s and the viewer’s subjectivity and objectivity. In Tocca’s work observation, memory and imagination combine in a continuous interplay between the particular sensory and tactile immediacy required when working out of doors. Despite their attempts at objectivity, Tocca’s landscapes are never neutral but always carry in them the presence of the artist; his body, his breathing and his movements as an observer and actor in the space he is occupying. The duration of the sitting is important, “the experience held for the time of the making and then perceived after the experience is over. And that experience is not simply one of passive observation which is then transferred into two dimensions. It is the experience of actively apprehending the world by depicting it: not just describing it as one sees it, but seeing it as one describes it.”2
1 Merlin James, TLS, June 13, 2003, p.18.1
2 Ibid.
List of Works.
David Schutter
DS vRu.05, 2025
Oil on canvas, 44.3 x 36.2 cm
Michele Tocca
Aurelian Walls (rain 9:44 am), 2025.
Oil on linen, 40 x 20 cm
Aurelian Walls (rain), 2025.
Oil on linen, 30 x 25 cm
Aurelian Walls (sotto in su), 2025.
Oil on linen, 24 x 27 cm