January 10 – February 23, 2002
For his first exhibition at the gallery, and his first show in New York in five years, Peter Schuyff takes as his point of inspiration Raphaelle Peale’s 1825 painting, Venus Rising From the Sea-A Deception, also called After the Bath. This enigmatic work, perhaps a sly commentary on the morals of the time, which were so haughtily endorsed by Raphaelle’s famous father, the portraitist, Charles Willson Peale, After the Bath’s playful conceit: the nude Venus, whose all-but-hidden figure stretches seductively behind the crisply delicate folds of a trompe l’oeil handkerchief actually serves to heighten, in a subtly subversive Mannerism, the voyeuristic, imaginative intent of passive viewer.
These convolutions and creases of the painting, both formal and intellectual, are an appropriate platform for Schuyff’s own signature riffs: patterned fields of robust, ribbony lines and vortices, filled in with fluid primary and secondary colors; his bold exoticism, variously heraldic and harlequinesque, primitive in its signal directness; the paintings are most often accompanied by a text or recognizable trope, i.e. a flag or logo etched as well in the artist’s own elegant, vibrantly embellished tricks-of-the-eye.
There will be thirty paintings in all in the show, each measuring 37 x 30 inches, and each initiating in the repeated patterns of the Peale original. Packed closely together on the gallery’s walls, like broad banners in a narrow street, they display the scope of Schuyff’s inexhaustible visual vocabulary; his jittery romance with color, form, and light.