INQUIRIES
In this new series of works, Schoolwerth furthers his exploration of the effects of abstraction on the task of representing the human body through painting. Grounded in an initial act of tracing the contours of a digital printout of Simon Vouet’s Aeneas and His Family Fleeing Troy from 1635, he develops his complex compositions by combining drawn, printed, and painted pictorial elements that generally compress the four figure scene at hand into what might be described as a pulverized, single new figure in formation.
Four decidedly different variations of the same painting are presented in the exhibition, along with a fifth derived from a scanned illustration of Aeneas and Anchises by Lionello Spada, an alternative, yet strikingly similar depiction of Virgil’s Aeneas returning with his wife and son to persuade his resistant father to leave during the sack of Troy.
A wide array of allegorical readings are rendered possible by these textured and tumultuous works, as their mythical narrative collides with the very fabric of their material content.
