HARRY SCHLEIFF
CONTENT
September 18-October 26, 2024
Untitled (playground), 2021
oil on linen
16 x 20”
Untitled (Highland Park), 2023
oil on panel
16 x 12”
Untitled (Yoga Spider), 2021
oil on panel
12 x 9”
Untitled (Bouquet), 2021
oil on linen
16 x 12”
Untitled (Funghi), 2022
oil on linen
12 x 8”
Untitled (Dirty Martini), 2024
oil on panel
10 x 8”
Untitled (Vulture warp), 2024
oil on canvas
24 x 30”
Untitled (Chase ATM), 2024
oil on canvas
9 x 12”
Untitled (Houseplant), 2024
oil on linen
20 x 16”
At the end of the nineteenth century, usage of “content” as a noun began to rapidly outstrip its occurrences of the word as a verb or an adjective. Now we speak of content, but rarely of being content or contenting ourselves.
Fast forward more than one hundred years, and content is all around us. Content, as in that which is held within a boundary; not content, as in satisfied. “The contented person’s desires,” says an online etymology dictionary, “are bound by what he or she already has.” “Every artistic conception,” writes Heinrich Wolfflin, is “organized according to certain notions of pleasure.”
Harry Schleiff paints contentedly, working from photographs just generic enough that they could be part of your photo library, or mine; sometimes they come from the repository of images we call the internet and are tweaked, just slightly, to become something new. Once an image is chosen, it is executed, painstakingly, over the course of months or even years. His surfaces are painted, but not painterly; there is no expressionistic fussing, and the compositions remain discrete images first, paintings second, perhaps because Schleiff originally trained as a filmmaker. Shadows are darkened and colors are heightened, but his paintings retain their tenuous hold on the realm of the real. Smooth and frictionless, representing something between what we see and what the screen shows to us, they go down as easily as the night’s second martini.
In Untitled (Highland Park), 2023, barren trees cast slate gray shadows which imply that we are on a late-afternoon fall promenade. A puddle reflects the leafless branches in oily striations of yellow and blue. Here and elsewhere, each shape is a uniform color that crisply butts up against its neighbor, creating a stained-glass effect. Untitled (Yoga Spider), 2021, applies this technique to portray a literal wine glass, clamped tightly over a spider and a note that reads “private yoga—Monday—Wednesday.” I think of Stuart Davis’s blue lightbulb painting, Edison Mazda, how he rendered volume from flat planes of color, and then I think of the pleasures of alcohol and intentional breathing. I do not consider the spider’s feelings. Untitled (Chase ATM), 2024, asks us to punch in our PIN, promising fresh twenties, though we might have to pay a fee of $2.99 to use this terminal. Together, these scenes evoke life’s pleasures—having cash on hand, an adult beverage, a walk around the Ridgewood Reservoir—from the icy, mediated distance of the camera.
Untitled (Vulture warp), 2024, with its obviously torqued, centrifugal center, calls all representation into question. With a click of the mouse, the grid that is the basis of our understanding of pictographic space—at least as presented by the Adobe Suite—swirls in on itself. Vulture warp conveys our contemporary condition, our constant “apprehension of the world as a shifting semblance,” to borrow again from Wöfflin, in Schleiff’s graphic style. Are the other images also photoshopped? The answer is not yes or no, but rather who cares. Even disfigured by technology, a vulture remains a vulture. Content is a noun.
—Canada Choate