In his most recent body of work, realist painter Robert Schefman hides his preoccupation with mortality in plain sight. His meticulously rendered figures, set in anonymous natural environments, express both the absurdity and the pathos of the human condition. The paintings invite us to consider life’s meaning—or lack thereof—with the artist as guide.
Schefman’s experience performing autopsies as a pre-med student at Detroit’s Harper University Hospital (the hospital where, coincidentally, he was also born) no doubt fed his early interest in the human body as a vessel for meaning. As he has observed, “I am fascinated with the human machine, with the structure of our bodies, our physical and emotional reality.” This longstanding obsession remains a central theme of the six new paintings in his solo exhibition “The Garden,” now on view at David Klein Gallery through March 7.
There is an elusive quality to the inhabitants of Schefman’s compositions: Often, his subjects face away from the picture plane, lost in some private interior. We are simultaneously pulled into the painting, especially into the larger ones, yet denied emotional entry. The paintings’ subjects are rendered in an impressively accurate realist style, but their identities are fungible. The emotional effect is intimate, yet remote, and feels a bit like the disordered reality depicted in David Lynch’s cinematic masterpiece “Mulholland Drive.” In the film, we are kept guessing about the sequence of events, the identities of individual players and their relationships with each other. The narrative slips into nightmare; circumstances and locations turn in upon themselves. Similarly equivocal, the protagonists in Schefman’s paintings intrigue us but remain unknown and unknowable.
In “Grasslands” we come upon two archetypal characters: a weary Black sharecropper, face averted, with a barefoot schoolgirl curled up at his feet. They have clearly endured a catastrophe, yet they remain solitary, seemingly unaware of each other. The scene is utterly ordinary yet dreamlike. They rest briefly, their damaged hands wrapped in bandages as a prairie fire in the distance burns on, uncontrolled.
In the painting “Maintain the Garden,” a young man rests from the interminable labor of cutting an endless swath of swamp grass with a vintage scythe. The anachronistic tool is clearly a metaphor for the Grim Reaper. The ominous late-afternoon sky suggests that he has been laboring all day yet remains far from finishing the job. The scythe is a plausible element in the composition and reappears in “Grasslands” (slightly less plausibly). In “Sisyphus & Camus,” the scythe becomes a narrative non-sequitur, though it functions quite well as a compositional device, pointing from the pensive female figure in the lower right foreground to the upper left interior of the painting, where we see recent calamity in an overturned table and broken crockery. Schefman lays his cards on the table with the title of the painting, referencing Camus’ celebrated essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in which the philosopher describes the existential conundrum of humans compelled to assign meaning to life in the face of the universe’s unreasoning silence.
The titles of Schefman’s paintings range from revealing to obscure, starting with his choice of “The Garden” as the name of the series. The Edenic implications of the word are subverted by the desolation of spent farm fields, grassy swamps and prairies, the human subjects at odds with their natural setting. The exhausted worker in “Maintain the Garden” is not so much tending a garden as he is engaged in an endless struggle to subdue his wild environment. Schefman’s literary titles, such as “Sisyphus & Camus” and “Arrival Fallacy,” are more intuitively comprehensible and helpfully illuminate the system of thought that underpins them.
The pivotal painting of the exhibition—to my mind at least—is “Arrival Fallacy.” This is the sole image in which a central figure makes eye contact with the viewer. A lone woman, formally dressed, directs her challenging gaze at you. Yes, you. On either side of her, two folding chairs face a wide, featureless band of surf and shore. One chair is overturned—like the table in “Sisyphus & Camus”—and suggests a recent catastrophe (or an altercation?). The term “arrival fallacy” is the false belief that achieving a goal will bring lasting happiness, and certainly the central figure seems less than content.
Schefman’s understated style of expression owes something to the dispassionate, almost clinical observations of the American realist Thomas Eakins. Certainly, he shares with Eakins his preoccupation with the human body. Also like Eakins, he uses photography (along with voluminous sketchbooks) to develop his compositions, combining coolly accurate representation with a taste for dramatic storytelling. The stealthy theatricality of his creative method moves the narratives into dreamlike, mythic territory. There is a hint of magic realism in the mix, but these artworks are drier and less sentimental.
In our current state of aesthetic pluralism which permits—or requires—artists to create their own meaning, Robert Schefman maintains his willed belief in the power of the illusionistic painted image. In this, he is an existential realist, suspecting the absurdity of his process while insisting upon its relevance.
“Robert Schefman: The Garden” is on view at David Klein Gallery, 678 Livernois, Ferndale, Michigan, through March 7.
