Clayton Schiff
Nervous System
March 13 - April 10, 2021
@
Real Pain
1819 3rd Ave
Los Angeles
Review by Vanessa Holyoak
The paintings in Clayton Schiff’s solo show, Nervous System (currently on view at Real Pain’s Arlington Heights gallery space), make up a delicately disturbing universe in which the daily and the disjointed commingle haphazardly, where abjection coexists with the fantastic and the banal in an airtight, hermetic space at the brink of an irreparable leak.
The canvases share a common palette of soothing and carefully chosen pastels, forming a series of saturated vignettes tightly contained within their frames, the paint never quite extending all the way to the canvas’ edge. Surrounded by these sealed-off scenes, I sense that I have sauntered casually into the psychological matter of something distinctly “other.”
The figures in Schiff’s paintings, neither human nor animal, are poised at the threshold of the non-human and the phantasmagorical — are these apparitions formed from a collective psyche, or are they the animated detritus of a hushed cityscape, the discomfiting residue of an emptied out urban ecosystem? Hinting at a version of New York City reinvented through the fuzzy distortions of memory, Schiff’s figures can be seen as manifestations of the unconscious rubble of the city’s collective imaginary, the haunting, galavanting bodies of an eerily tranquil cityscape — one that can’t help but bring to mind the hollowed urban space left in the pandemic’s wake.
The awkward excess of the figures’ demeanors, aloof within their variously urban, suburban, and abstracted environments (from tennis courts to primordial pools to stripped-down, vacuum-like backdrops), harbors a provocative and disquieting tension: figures haloed by the glowy hues of meticulously applied paint appear at once isolated, curious, and lost, caught in myriad gestures of bodily boredom, seeking out pleasure by desperate means — masturbating at the edge of a pond in The Screen, binging a phallus-like, oversized sandwich amidst a disarray of papers in Night In.
Reminiscent of the illustrations of children’s books and comics, from Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are to Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch, the paintings in Nervous System evoke the sordid undertones of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, designed to make hard-to-stomach truths more palatable, to coat frightening information in a rosy glaze. Similarly, the uncanny and unsettling gestures of Schiff’s figures — whether embodied by the quiet gaze of a queasily-orange, dog-like creature upon a snail leaving its slime trail beside a white picket fence, or the lazy drooping of a pastel pink body around a hovering blank globe — rub up against the uncomfortable, at times nauseating experience of being in a body, while Schiff’s varied use of pastel gradients offers a comforting antidote to these traumas, a medium through which to digest the abject psychological imprints of a city, and perhaps a generation, on overdrive.
I want to reach out to these frenetic subjects, to touch them as an osteopath would gently manipulate her overwrought patients, to coax them to a slow stop, to release their nervous systems and recalibrate their spastic bodies. I feel sorry for them as I would the characters of a fairy tale: their suffering teaches me something, but my catharsis can’t keep them alive.
