Arturo Herrera and David Schutter
@ Tony Wight Gallery
845 W Washington Blvd, Chicago, IL 60607
Opening Friday, September 10th, from 5PM - 8PM
On view through Saturday, October 9th
Arturo Herrera and David Schutter’s joint project is a visual contemplation on the nature of The Double and its difficult ontological implications. Often inviting speculations of the uncanny, things that repeat only once pose questions to origin that can de-stabilize the relationships of being and time while also threatening aspects of historical value. Twins, pairs, doppelgangers, fakes, and reflections are thus sources of double-takes and déjà vu, but are more so fractures that beg inquiry of the way we view the world as a whole and evaluate the continuity of its parts. However, repeated forms are also a site for searching variations that may indicate flaws in total replication in an attempt to resettle such perceptual fractures; as in the case of encountering identical twins, where the natural impulse to find differences is a way to re-assign autonomy. In this exhibition, Herrera and Schutter each work in the format of paired works, employing the tactic of presenting double images that display both repetitions and divergences at once. Partly flouting the traditional diptych, where narrative tableaux are given, these contemporary artists have used the double as an ambiguous ground to situate the phenomena of both fracture and re-construction.
Mining the content of depiction and abstraction, Arturo Herrera and David Schutter show in their independent pairs how sameness and difference are often co-dependent. In a pair of painted collages by Herrera, or a pair of drawings on prepared paper by Schutter, identical replications are an admitted impossibility that the artists sublimate instead toward meditations on hybridity, deviation, and historical re-enactment. Both artists rework and re-investigate the idea of “duplication” in their presented pairs, creating a series of intersections. Their resultant works are more dialectical than binary or narrative, in this regard, and each work in the exhibition metaphorically functions like the double-images of the stereo-scope, in which depth can only be perceived by viewing the two images together.
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