Charlotte Schulz

Schulz indicates that two foundational interests have structured her art: space and narrative.[14] Influenced by philosophers exploring malleable conceptions of space and time, such as Gaston Bachelard, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Elizabeth Grosz, her work conveys multiple, proliferating views and a cinema-like temporality.[4][7][26] She draws on personal history, art and poetry, news events and collective experiences for imagery; her early work was more personally focused, while since the mid-2000s, she has linked the personal with public and geopolitical issues such as the nature of violence and hatred, tragedy, terrorism and war, and the environment.[16][1] Schulz's drawings evolve intuitively, often beginning with ideas from reading, which she develops in sketchbooks before rendering small sections of an image at length, often without a predetermined plan.[1] Her delicate charcoal drawing technique has been noted by New York Times critic Benjamin Genocchio, among others, for its close observation and painstaking detail, heightened level of finish, and control of the medium's capabilities.[3][27][28][7]

Charlotte Schulz, With head shorn she listens to the sleeper sleeping away the dream and dreaming the lives of an acquired wisdom, charcoal on paper, 17" x 14", 2000.

Schulz's early oil paintings arose out of the dislocation she felt following her parents' divorce and move to the alien suburban sprawl and tropical life of Florida.[18] These large works explore memories, charged emotions and relationship to place, using a recurrent, intimate metaphor of a house set in suburban landscapes to represent the human psyche.[16][18] In an effort to break from a single perspective format, Schulz reshaped styles and spatial treatments of the past—drawing on sources from Cezanne, Cubism and Giorgio de Chirico to traditional Chinese landscape painting and the early Renaissance (e.g., Giotto)—to create personal, contemporary statements.[16][18][21] They employ subtle shifts between maze-like interiors and suburban scenes to create fictionalized, cinema-like narratives, informed in part by her reading of Bachelard's phenomenological work The Poetics of Space.[16][18]

Curator Henry Geldzahler wrote that multi-view paintings like A Room of My Own suggest the complex ways we experience architecture through "an original amalgam of aspects of Futurism and American Surrealism."[21] Other critics compared Schulz's stairways leading nowhere, unexpected doors and dreamlike, tilted rooms—in that work and others, such as Persephone's House With a Chimney (1995)—to the psychological architectures of 18th-century Italian visionary Giovanni Battista Piranesi's fantastical Carceri prison etchings.[16][18]

In the late 1990s, Schulz moved to Boston (and subsequently, Brooklyn). Finding herself in a crowded urban setting, with less workspace, she turned to modest-sized, single-sheet drawings made in charcoal that, while still personal, were also informed by imagery drawn from poets such as Wallace Stevens and Robert Kelly, philosophy and psychology.[1][5][29] She relinquished the need to start with a structuring house image, instead taking an approach that upended seemingly fixed, opposed constructs like inside and outside, influenced by the fluid, non-Cartesian conception of space and events posited in Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.[30][31][5]

These ideas were compatible with her interest in portraying shifts in thought and emotion, mysterious and portentous narratives, and movement in time rather than static scenes; the resulting works, including her "Inside the Monad" series, synthesize landscape, architecture, interiors, objects and weather elements.[30][5][31] Critic Dominique Nahas described such drawings (e.g., With head shorn, she listens to the sleeper sleeping away the dream and dreaming the lives of acquired wisdom, 2002), as delicately detailed, intensely private, charged vignettes and "incantatory revelations" that "suggest the flitting of intertwined memories."[30]

Beginning in 2005, Schulz shifted to large-scale, intricate charcoal drawings composed of multiple sheets that she often tore, folded, bent and distressed, reshaping and disrupting the picture plane.[32][5] These black-and-white works drew on diverse imagery and extensive reading, and increasingly, linked personal experience to collective, often-traumatic experiences, such as 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.[32][1][25] They employ a careful blending of charcoal and delicate erasure that interweaves vignettes of haunted landscapes and elegant interiors intruded upon by war and natural disasters amid the folded terrain, low relief and untouched voids of the paper.[3][2][33]

Charlotte Schulz, Traversing an Open Interior, charcoal and pastel on paper, 47" x 39" x 1", 2017–8.

Schulz's surfaces function like screens onto which she projects and layers beliefs, emotions, and potential realities or parallel worlds to form purposefully disjointed narratives that suggest a contemporary psychological index;[1][6][14] the language poetry-like titles she composes mirror the juxtaposition of visual elements.[2] A 2010 Village Voice review describes her work as conveying complex moods moving between comfort and fear rather than clearly delineated narratives, and counts it among a "renaissance in the realm of the fantastical" for realist drawing.[2] Formally, these later drawings explore tensions between real and illusionist space and the sculptural potential of paper, often taking on non-rectangular, object-like configurations that suggest physical, dynamic forces at play.[32][24][5]

Schulz created the eight-panel drawing The Maximum of All Possible Hate Is Realized and We Cleave to Our Screens as It Unfolds in That Disquieting Way (2005) in response to the 9/11 attacks.[1][34] Its sheets are arranged on the wall like dominoes (or story panels) and depict incongruous imagery: an airplane flying through a room, everyday domestic elements, explosions, scenes of passage and escape, a sheep on a platform.[1] John Parks of Drawing describes it as "a potent and thoughtful reflection on how public events intrude on and redefine our private lives, and conversely, how our private lives intrude on and redefine history," also noting its ability to convey connections and correspondences unavailable to a simple linear narrative.[1]

In Schulz's shows "An Insufficiency in Our Screens" (Aldrich Museum, 2007; Mills College, 2008) and "The Uneven Intensities of Duration" (2010, Smack Mellon; Wake Forest), the softer blending and merging of imagery in her earlier work gave way to razor-sharp detail, maximum contrast, and more dramatic, disruptive folds in her surfaces.[5][33][35] These individual and multi-sheet drawings feature abandoned landscapes shot through with billowing darkness and light, dislocated interiors, and unexpected juxtapositions of size (tiny figures, vast spaces), non-sequiturs, symbols and collective memory (e.g., Suspended in the Midst of a Flood the Past Carries Itself into a Current Location and Pressures a Rescue from Geographical Forces, 2010).[4][36][37] Reviews characterize this work as pristine and unsettling, photographically precise,[4][3] and radically unstable like "optical obstacle courses";[37] Bay Area critic DeWitt Cheng describes Schulz's depiction of space as "episodic and contradictory, and impossible to grasp as a totality […] fractured, like our consciousness."[24]

In her "The Impossibility of Keeping Borders" (2011–2) and "Incursion of Otherness" (2013–4) series,[35] Schulz explored crinkled textures and torn, irregular edges to a greater degree, while continuing to address historic upheavals like the Arab Spring through puzzling juxtapositions of desolate landscapes, buildings with semi-transparent walls, and elements such as miniature rowboats, beds, and penguins.[6][7] Her "Territory of Significance" (2015–6), "Groundlessness" (2017–8) and "Voyage" (2018–9) series[35] increasingly suggest maps, both through their irregular, continent-like shapes and mash-ups of deconstructed, varied terrains and settings spilling over and growing out of folds and bends in the paper.[38][39][40] Works such as An Early Map with No One to Say When the Ocean Begins or Traversing an Open Interior (both 2017) feature archaeological, geological and life forms seen from above suggesting timeless societal, environmental and internal processes taking place in a divided world.[12][40]

Charlotte Schulz, Within a Great Wind a Vista Opens Up, oil on linen, 35" x 48", 2015–6.

After a long hiatus from painting, Schulz returned to it in 2012, incorporating insights gained from her charcoal drawings, while returning to the house motif of earlier work. Like her drawings, these paintings (e.g., Within a Great Wind a Vista Opens Up, 2016, from her "Becoming Nomadic" series) make connections between disparate images—some culled from Renaissance art, others contemporary—while using the house as an intermediary between inside, outside and a world in flux.[41]