| If you care about abstract painting—especially if you care about really smart, technically deft abstract painting—you need to see Robert Schatz’s show at The Phatory in Manhattan’s Alphabet City. There, about a block off of Tompkins Square Park, Schatz has staged a little riot of his own. Many of the paintings are created on the temple of order that is staff paper. By making the choice to apply paint—his own form of notation—on top of this particular paper type, Schatz seems to be making the point that there is another order at work here altogether. It’s not as logical or as mathematical as the paper that its applied to (and all of that paper’s connotations), but is instead more natural and intuitive. |  |
In Order: Robert Schatz at The Phatory – Brent Burket
“In a poem, one line may hide another line. As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.”
—Kenneth Koch
If you care about abstract painting—especially if you care about really smart, technically deft abstract painting—you need to see Robert Schatz’s show at The Phatory in Manhattan’s Alphabet City. There, about a block off of Tompkins Square Park, Schatz has staged a little riot of his own.
Many of the paintings are created on the temple of order that is staff paper. By making the choice to apply paint—his own form of notation—on top of this particular paper type, Schatz seems to be making the point that there is another order at work here altogether. It’s not as logical or as mathematical as the paper that its applied to (and all of that paper’s connotations), but is instead more natural and intuitive.
Schatz’s version of what this type of order looks like is as unpredictable as it is involving and warm. I had seen a few of the paintings in jpeg form before my visit, but I wasn’t ready for their power on the walls. And, I certainly wasn’t ready for many of Shatz’s variations on his own style.
In two of the works, Schatz fills half of a lined-off, rectangular space with his intertwining swoops and sways. The other half is left white. It’s a conversation with minimalism. It’s a fill-in-the-blank exercise for the viewer and juxtaposition of motion and breathing room. Obviously, too, it’s something spectacular to look at.
Another painting here looks as though Shatz has taken his signature forms and squashed them into a short, elongated hill in the middle of the chosen type of white paper. Here, however, the background was also painted. Within the context of that white background, I quickly noticed all of the lovely, subtle gestures that Shatz had made here—I realized the way in which the painting kept burrowing into itself.
In stark contrast to all this is the painting on the back wall of The Phatory. The background isn’t quite black and Schatz’s gestures atop this vague darkness aren’t quite white, either. The piece also stands out since the painting’s surface is smoother than anything else in the gallery. Its anomalous nature, however, somehow made perfect sense in the order of this show.
One train is indeed hiding another train here, and they’re both beautiful. Jump them.
