David Schutter @ Sikkema Jenkins

In this show, David Schutter remakes Watteau and Constable pictures, to scale, from memory. At least this is the premise. His palette of ashy oils suggests the murkiness of memory, but they also suggest that mimesis is not his objective, rather, the opposite. Schutter takes a picture as his model and distills it, reducing it to pure subjectivity. Depiction evaporates, leaving only self-aware mark-making. As he transfers the task of assembling a picture to his viewers, and makes Constable transparent, one may entertain a notion of him as a hybrid of Cecily Brown and Robert Ryman. The viewer must sink or swim in his luscious mud, and, along the way, reflect on what Schutter enables painting to say.

Until February 21 at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.