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Painter - Gabriela Schutz
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This painting is part of a series of perspectives on imaginary suburban landscapes. It depicts an ”ideal city”: organized, structured,
easy to observe. It is, in fact, under surveillance by the painter, perched at a point where her gaze encompasses a large portion of
the city.
The distance between a utopian city and one resembling a huge jail is not too great. When Piero Della Francesca (to whom the painting
is attributed) painted his Ideal City, he presumably did not have in mind the horrible implication apparent in Gabriela Schutz’s work.
He must really have believed in the power of geometry and architecture to create a structured environment suitable for human beings.
But today, over 500 years after Piero and the Renaissance, the word “geometry”, in a context pertaining to social organization, has a
completely different connotation. Shutz’s suburb looks more like Breughel’s Tower of Babel “laid down” on its side.
This suburb is as horrible as Breughel’s Tower and even more so, exactly because it is so human: it is striving for order, law, and clarity.
But while Piero and Breughel had room for variety even within the architectural “machine”, Schutz’s “ideal” city seems to have been
designed by a computer. This city becomes an abstract pattern, indifferent to any human singularity. That must be why there are no
humans in this place. It is a ghost town. Note the oval format of the picture: it conveys nostalgia, in advance, for something that is
no more. Schutz manages to create a disturbing meeting between what is brand new and what “has been”. It is, simultaneously,
completely new and utterly deserted. Like the Tower of Babel, the ambitiousness of the project exposes not only human potential
but also the fear motivating its realization, since in reality, such systematic organization of space is possible only in a cemetery.
The ability to observe is what makes this ostensibly idyllic picture so disturbing, beyond exaggerated order and organization.
The observation inherent in the painting conveys the message that order is a by-product of a brutal regime. Remember that
Baron Osman created the wide boulevards of Paris to prevent the erection of barricades in the streets in case of a popular uprising.
Gabriela Schutz emphasizes the power of surveillance, but puts equal emphasis on her own uneasiness: the whole painting leans
sideways, as though the painter had turned her head, refusing to watch this city the way an Orwellian Big Brother would have watched it.
She has painted it compassionately, not out of a wish to dominate. |
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