Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA

Naoki Sutter-Shudo, End of Thinking Capacity (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo’s exhibition End of Thinking Capacity stages a standoff between paintings and their audience. In the center of the room, a series of humanoid sculptures emanate from stacked boxes with the names of arts publications (including Artforum, Spike, and Mousse) scrawled on their sides. Like a faction of sinister critics in formation, the totems’ small, skull-like heads ogle and jeer at eleven oil paintings hung tightly across one gallery wall. Raucous metronomes adjoin the heads, as though mimicking their judgments. At first, the sculptures displace visitors, who might otherwise expect a standard solitary experience with the paintings. Instead, an impudent drama unfolds, interpolating viewers in a confrontation between sculpture and painting that provides a new perspective on the relationship between critic and artist.

Filled with back issues of each publication, the boxes serve as pedestals that support the antic critics, affording them a platform in both senses of the word. Subject to the dirt of the gallery’s floor, the slipshod boxes gesture at the precarious landscape of art publishing. But whatever anxiety expressed here is done so jocularly. From their contorted expressions to their bizarre adornments, the mixed-media and enamel sculptures seem like a send up of the sourpuss critic. In costuming his figures, Sutter-Shudo tends towards junk dada, draping bubble wrap like a scarf over one sculpture, placing a piece of lettuce like a hat over another. Absurdly, the sculptures’ metronomes are tuned to different registers, ticking along at different speeds, producing a shrieking discordance as difficult to bear as a snide review.

As the critics chide the paintings, the paintings chide the critics back. Their styles and genres sample from the contemporary painting market, ranging from the political to the mundane, the figural to the abstract. Requirement (2023) satirizes the critics’ chosen medium by representing the binding of a pale pink book with the word “Book” repeating throughout its spine and covers. Saint-Just (2024) is a pop portrait of Jacobin leader Louis de Saint-Just, ironizing his revolutionary legacy through the genre of mass commercialization. In After Alexandra Noel’s “Bookmarks,”  Shutter-Shudo reproduces a still life by his wife, while in The gentleman has been served (Pierrette Le Pen 1987) (both works 2024), he appropriates a photograph of Pierrette Le Pen, who spited her ex-husband—a far-right French politician who refused to pay her alimony—by partaking in a sexy maid shoot for Playboy. In the painting, the half-clothed Le Pen cleans a kitchen floor, eyes fixed menacingly on the critics—and viewer.

In the critical-artistic impasse staged by Sutter-Shudo, viewers are left to ponder the spectacle of the scene, its anxieties, and the contexts shaping the relationships between art and audience. Leaving the exhibition, I thought of the rancorous narrator of Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (1984), who spends the duration of an “artistic” dinner party grousing about his fellow guests, “these artistic nonentities…these unappetizing painters and sculptors and writers and musicians and actors, these horrendous provincial artists who converge on Vienna in droves.” A similarly churlish attitude defines much of the exhibition’s humor. But while Bernhard’s narrator tends toward disillusioned joylessness, Sutter-Shudo’s work is disruptive and strange. End of Thinking Capacity delights in the art world’s clamoring echo chamber, then reaches beyond it.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo: End of Thinking Capacity runs from January 13–February 17, 2024 at Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA (6916 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90038).

Naoki Sutter-Shudo, End of Thinking Capacity (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo, Requirement (2023). Oil on canvas, 60 x 52 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo, Arrival (2024). Oil on canvas, 60 x 52 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo, End of Thinking Capacity (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo, End of Thinking Capacity (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo, Critical Figure 3 (detail) (2024). Mixed media of various organic and inorganic
material, enamel, and metronome mechanism. Image courtesy of the artist and Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo, Critical Figure 3 (detail) (2024). Mixed media of various organic and inorganic
material, enamel, and metronome mechanism. Image courtesy of the artist and Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo, End of Thinking Capacity (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo, End of Thinking Capacity (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Isabella Miller lives and works in Los Angeles.

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