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Worlds Away
John Haberin New York City
Jordan Kasey, Rita Lundqvist, and Dana Schutz
When Jordan Kasey looks at painting, she sees another planet entirely, only very much like this one. It also looks very much like one before NASA made it to Mars, but then she can quote Modernism from memory.
Rita Lundqvist is exploring, too, if only as far as the frozen north. And why go further? For a New Yorker, that seems challenging and remote enough. Besides, Kasay returns fully to earth after four icy years, while probing still further painting's past, a woman's future, and the revival of representation today. Should that be enough to keep artists busy? After getting burned by a display of political commitment at the Whitney, Dana Schutz returns to the body in motion, but with her head in the clouds. 
Schutz has never lacked for ambition or anxiety. The revival of painting can pull artists in all sorts of directions, but she feels the pull in her gut. When she paints a runner on a treadmill, she could be thrilling to a body in motion—or wondering why so many feel stuck on a treadmill, maybe even her. A monitor on the gym equipment could pass for a car window, and she may still feel like a child pleading with her parents: Are we there yet? Not any time soon.
A woman's planet
With Trump in office and a solid GOP majority in Congress, humanity was one step closer to destroying the earth, but try not to worry. Then and now, NASA is on the lookout for habitable worlds. A Web page ranks the current top twenty candidates, and even then it has forgotten to look on the Lower East Side. With "Exoplanet," Jordan Kasey takes the search for extraterrestrial life to the most obvious place of all, art. As tends to happen in painting, it looks disorienting but strangely familiar. It also looks built to last.
The show's title borrows the term for a planet orbiting a star other than the sun, but Kasey updates Fernand Léger for contemporary Brooklyn. With his late work, Léger already adapts the monumentality of Renaissance art and Neoclassicism to modern life. Like Pablo Picasso around the same time, he was setting aside Cubist fragmentation, give or take cascading walls and shifting breasts. His three women share morning coffee and patterned flooring out of Paris in the twentieth century, but with rounded flesh, nude bodies, unsmiling faces, and an otherworldly detachment. In reviewing his 1998 MoMA retrospective, I spoke of his icy humanism. Kasey just takes things one step further, to people you only thought you knew.
It may help that she is a woman, allowing her to dispense with nudity and to restore a degree of privacy. At the Table returns to the scene of Léger's Three Women (Le Grande Déjeuner), but for a single woman seen only from the rear. Women at poolside or in a backyard at night have their faces cut off by the picture's edge or a head of hair. Still, the table's plates stand empty, and the pool is nowhere to be seen. Like Elizabeth Glaessner in a pool and in paint, all appear in harsh colors and a ghostly light. A woman at the piano leans close to the keys in a kind of rapture, but ordinary pleasures seem far away.
They challenge one to engage them or to identify the scene at hand. Before too long, angled planes and dark waves define an open box crossed by shadows, but full lips and eyebrows may never quite cohere into an upside-down pink, gray, and yellow head. Its nose looks like hair, maybe pubic hair, because sensuality is never quite present and never far away. It may also owe something to the style of a graphic novel. Kasey has kept her sense of humor along with her emotional life even as she approaches other worlds. When it comes to another planet, men may or may not be welcome.
Rita Lundqvist brings a simplicity to her women, too, like Ivy Haldeman. She picks up on Modernism as well, although the later kind associated with formalism. Her compositions run to grays, plain horizontal divisions, and lush brushwork akin to early abstraction by Brice Marden, before he discovered curves and colors for their own sake. They run to squares as well, accentuating their small-m minimalism. The women look anything but at home, though, even on the rare occasion that they share a canvas. The small dimensions heighten their isolation.
They do not come from another planet, but they do come from Sweden, and Lundqvist's grays and isolation may reflect long winters and a northern light. Like Kasey's, her women also bring with them a melancholy comedy. One sinks into the ground as if stuck in Kasey's cardboard box. Others pose against a great deal of ice or just the horizon. Yet they keep their composure, their nuanced expressions, their hidden narratives, and their hopes. Even a Nordic landscape has a flowering tree.
Back on earth
Back then, Kasey went in search of another planet orbiting another star, but then her art was always searching—and her figures as familiar and alien as extraterrestrial life. Now she is back for "The Storm," with such mundane concerns as a good party, a good night's sleep, and the weather. Still, just as in "Exoplanet," nothing is simply down to earth. Her figures seem both confined and open to the sky, buried beneath a still life or in a blanket, but with a view. Someone in an actual space capsule must feel the same. This is a habitable world, but never fully hers or yours.
Four years later, Kasey is still a standout in the revival of painting, narrative, and figuration, but her subject does not reveal itself all at once. The very first look slows you down. She has always had monumental figures and monumental canvases, but now she can take advantage of the gallery's new space in Tribeca, where sheets of bright, neon colors move in and out of darker ones. This could almost be epic abstraction. She keeps slowing you down, too, right to the end. How else to account for so many hands begging for company and for space?
She is still conversant, too, in early Modernism, even as the stories and colors belong to today. She still has the columnar limbs and fragmentation of Léger, without the red, yellow, blue, and white stripes. Her compositions no longer quote him and Cubism directly, but the fruit on her table and the massed fabric in her bedding have a long history. She now makes a point of a transience and immediacy, as with a woman's blown hair in a lightning storm, but not entirely. The person in profile under an umbrella, as sharp as the edge of his or her nose, is not going anywhere fast. The figure with electric eyes in Losing Sleep has a long night ahead.
Gender is at issue, but not exactly sex. Kasey sees the troubled sleeper through her legs, but she is not spreading her private parts like a woman for Gustave Courbet. The face in the rain, eyes cut off, may be male, but I am not placing my bets. Almost everyone is clinging to something for creature comforts, but they seem all the more alone for that. Dance Party amounts to a lone woman between two partial faces shrouded in darker, icier colors, like marble busts. Kasey titles another painting Trust, but good luck with that.
Not that they are giving up. They are no longer searching for less stormy world, just waiting for it to come to them. A man lies clothed and at full length on the floor, which cannot be comfortable. His blond hair contrasts with the sober and unnatural tones of his flesh, shirt, and pants. Yet he turns his face toward the stars. The floor tiles put on their own vivid display, at least one patterned on the night sky. A long summer evening looks less lazy than eerie, but the open window is just one more point of light.
Kasey does not settle for sentiment or easy messages. This is not about hope or despair, but about painting in the present. Her technique is more varied than before as well. It can look stained for those fields of color or scratched for the texture of a blanket. Thicker but narrower strokes make colors seem to dart forward through the black of another fabric. The result is her closest approach yet to life.
Unhappy Together
If you are of a certain age, you will remember "Imagine Me and You" as the opening of a dreamy pop song, "Happy Together." (Even now, I cannot get it out of my head.) The Turtles recorded it in 1967, and twenty-five years later the band's lead singers still ended their sets with it, as Flo & Eddie. In truth, it was also their only monster hit (apart perhaps from "Eleanor"), and it amounted to little more than a repeated verse and chorus, building to stronger and stronger harmonies. Dana Schutz cannot help repeating herself either, and a good thing, too. 
She takes the line as the title of her latest work, in which everything is a dream and no two people are all that happy together.
In Mountain Group, the cast literally has its head in the clouds. Still, they all seem intent on their own agendas, apart from pointing fingers at the sky, themselves, or each other. Each has ascended by a different ladder. Whether they have a shot at a return to earth is another matter. Some have swell heads indeed, while the smallest is painting—less as an active observer than as an escape from the crowd. It could be the artist herself, but then no one here has a clear gender, unless there is a gender called monster.
Life in the clouds is fun all the same, not to mention funny. Flo, for that matter, was short for the Phlorescent Leech, and he could not stop himself from rhyming the song's title with "and how is the weather?" For the first time Schutz includes sculpture, and the rays emanating from Sun Lady pun on the crown of the Statue of Liberty. Still, she does better in painting, where the impulse to caricature becomes not a shortcut but a compulsion. She even turns it on herself, as Painting in an Earthquake. At least she can claim to be painting, although the figure, in hot red pants, has one foot on a bowling ball and an apple of discord in one hand.
If her big butt implies a male viewer (that "you"), the closest thing to a traditional female nude is The Visible World—meaning what you are seeing. Most other actors are men. They may be at sea together, like an unlikely pair in a rowboat (one perhaps a mere puppet), but they are still strangers, as another title has it, and mostly struggling, much of the time with themselves. A wanderer is half naked, as if split down the middle, with the ankle bracelet of a prisoner and the face of a devil. As up on the mountain, hands are notably expressive, and most characters have three of four of them—unless, that is, one or two belong to an unseen other grabbing them from behind. One figure has a hand in place of everything from the waist up, but a larger hand has it under control.
At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Schutz came under fire for an open casket, in memory of the civil rights era and Emmett Till. She must have been aching afterward to escape from politics to the imagination. She must have been glad, too, to return to her strengths in cramped spaces, powerful bodies, mythic narrative, lush paint, and layered compositions—as in a fight, also at the Biennial, in an elevator. She must have been wondering (speaking of "Happy Together") why we cannot just get along. Only she had then to face her own reminders of why not. If one figure looks suspiciously like Donald J. Trump in pursuit of an angel, she cannot leave politics altogether behind.
She is also not just repeating herself. Schutz has often run to large groups, including an art class, in earthy colors under a clear light. Now the scenes stick more often to one or two figures—depending on who is counting. Impasto plays a greater role, too, as in a woman's breasts and hair, and clashing colors are downright, well, fluorescent. She also brings a reminder of why her critics were wrong. She might have been merely a white speaking against racism, but an artist cannot help reimagining you, others, and herself.
Jordan Kasey ran at Nicelle Beauchene through March 12, 2017, and through March 27, 2021, Rita Lundqvist at Tanya Bonakdar through February 4, 2017, and Dana Schutz at Petzel through February 23, 2019. Related articles have looked before at Schutz in Chelsea and in a Whitney Biennial.