Charlotte Schulz
[4][5][6] Artillery critic Seph Rodney describes her drawings as works of "elegant and surreal lyricism" that are exquisitely rendered, thick with detail, and perplexing in their mix of fractured visual logic, overlapping realities, and speculative ruminations on space and time.
[16][18] In an effort to break from a single perspective format, Schulz reshaped styles and spatial treatments of the past—drawing on sources from Cezanne, Cubism and Giorgio de Chirico to traditional Chinese landscape painting and the early Renaissance (e.g., Giotto)—to create personal, contemporary statements.
[1][5][29] She relinquished the need to start with a structuring house image, instead taking an approach that upended seemingly fixed, opposed constructs like inside and outside, influenced by the fluid, non-Cartesian conception of space and events posited in Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.
[30][31][5] These ideas were compatible with her interest in portraying shifts in thought and emotion, mysterious and portentous narratives, and movement in time rather than static scenes; the resulting works, including her "Inside the Monad" series, synthesize landscape, architecture, interiors, objects and weather elements.
[3][2][33] Schulz's surfaces function like screens onto which she projects and layers beliefs, emotions, and potential realities or parallel worlds to form purposefully disjointed narratives that suggest a contemporary psychological index;[1][6][14] the language poetry-like titles she composes mirror the juxtaposition of visual elements.
[1] In Schulz's shows "An Insufficiency in Our Screens" (Aldrich Museum, 2007; Mills College, 2008) and "The Uneven Intensities of Duration" (2010, Smack Mellon; Wake Forest), the softer blending and merging of imagery in her earlier work gave way to razor-sharp detail, maximum contrast, and more dramatic, disruptive folds in her surfaces.
[5][33][35] These individual and multi-sheet drawings feature abandoned landscapes shot through with billowing darkness and light, dislocated interiors, and unexpected juxtapositions of size (tiny figures, vast spaces), non-sequiturs, symbols and collective memory (e.g., Suspended in the Midst of a Flood the Past Carries Itself into a Current Location and Pressures a Rescue from Geographical Forces, 2010).
[4][36][37] Reviews characterize this work as pristine and unsettling, photographically precise,[4][3] and radically unstable like "optical obstacle courses";[37] Bay Area critic DeWitt Cheng describes Schulz's depiction of space as "episodic and contradictory, and impossible to grasp as a totality […] fractured, like our consciousness.
"[24] In her "The Impossibility of Keeping Borders" (2011–2) and "Incursion of Otherness" (2013–4) series,[35] Schulz explored crinkled textures and torn, irregular edges to a greater degree, while continuing to address historic upheavals like the Arab Spring through puzzling juxtapositions of desolate landscapes, buildings with semi-transparent walls, and elements such as miniature rowboats, beds, and penguins.
[38][39][40] Works such as An Early Map with No One to Say When the Ocean Begins or Traversing an Open Interior (both 2017) feature archaeological, geological and life forms seen from above suggesting timeless societal, environmental and internal processes taking place in a divided world.
