Contributed by Lucas Moran / On Instagram, where most artists list their websites, exhibitions, and accomplishments beneath their handles, Dan Schein keeps it simple: “artist/painter,” followed by “Person Who Stutters.” It’s fitting for a painter whose work, some now on display at JJ Murphy Gallery, feels as though it may sometimes have a tough time coming out of him. But Schein, a painter’s painter, knows how to elicit beauty from struggle. His pieces seem to have been dragged to hell and back – scraped, scumbled, discarded, and finally reconsidered before being coaxed into their finished form. Though he works at various scales, this show focuses on smaller works. In scaling down, he loses none of the vitality of his larger paintings. The gesture, line, and action remain front-and-center. Intimately-sized vignettes function like figures caught in a storybook world, governed by impulse, sometimes id, and by the deeply human need to recline, reflect, and endure the complicated task of existing.
In Hug a Tree, a strange, dreamlike landscape rendered viscerally – possibly with an old, unwashed brush – holds a lone female figure who is compelled to do exactly that, the tree basking in golden sunlight. While the marks are ostensibly garish, closer inspection reveals nuanced color, light, and value. They tell a folksy, humorous fable, distorted and a little naïve: a woman dressed in a doublet, seemingly plucked from the 1400s, embraces the natural world, reminding the viewer that it once produced awe. Winter has ended and spring is imminent. Each cloud – a smudge transitioning from dark to light, a violent flurry of strokes, an ultramarine shape outlined in opaque blue – seems to belong to a different sky. What better way to deliver the message that it’s time to get back outside than by borrowing the painterly language of Chaim Soutine, who saw landscape and season as forms of romance?
Farmer’s Lunch features a modest table setting: cheese, meat, bread, and a mug. It’s a quiet statement about relishing small pleasures while we can, simple and efficient, enlisting just enough brushstrokes. The shapes and forms function like Matisse’s, especially during the 1913–17 period when he was flirting with cubism. Where he used hard lines and a Fauvist color scheme, though, Schein sticks with uneven contours and colors mottled in a distinctly American way, calling to mind Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and early Alice Neel. Schein lets soft yellow underpainting illuminate the Payne’s grey drape of the tablecloth. The muted crimson, raw umber, and Naples yellow he uses to depict the humble repast suggest that our days are all we have, our true glory the work we put into them.
Water Pressure strikes a more ironic tone. Brashly lit and crudely rendered in brick red, cruddy ochre, and sap greens, sometimes caked on, the piece evokes depression. Yet it’s hard not to think – and laugh – about our current president’s bizarre obsession with the subject of the painting. Possibly it’s just that sad trickle of water that’s producing the figure’s deeply unsatisfied expression. Though funny, the painting also lands as an allegory of modern despair, on how we try to manage stress when life is uncomfortable, off-kilter, and politically fraught.
When finesse, slickness, and illustration are dominant, Schein elects to wade deep into the raw, foundational languages of expressionism à la Jules Olitski or Odilon Redon. At home with impasto and the tactile weight of built-up surfaces, Schein privileges vestige, process, gesture, mark-making, and, most of all, curiosity. His devotion to the journey of painting, to letting the material guide the image, is clear. He understands that, in the end, it’s all just colored mud, but also that there is something honest, maybe even sublime, about that.
“Dan Schein: Dan Paintings,” JJ Murphy Gallery, 53 Stanton Street, New York, NY. Through May 10, 2025.
About the author: Lucas Moran is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. Moran’s paintings have been included in many shows in the United States and Canada, and he has had several solo shows in New York City.
