Douglas Max Utter at Dead Horse - Lakewood, Ohio - painting exhibition - Brief Article

Over the past two decades, Douglas Max Utter has established a strong reputation as a passionately expressionistic painter of the human figure. While his work looks raw and spontaneous, a fiercely intelligent deliberation informs each gesture. He begins with a realistically modeled black pastel drawing of his subject rubbed into the canvas, then covers the surfaces with succeeding layers of asphalt, tar, oil paint, latex, shellac and solvents, so that the outlines of the subject leak and bleed into the ground surrounding them. The result is a vision of porous flesh in a steady state of flux, as if the human body were constantly feeding and being fed by energies outside of it. The palpable textures of the materials lend a strong physical presence that grounds an essentially metaphysical view of the boundaries of the self.

Utter's recent exhibition, "The Long Embrace: Of Arms and Highways," showed him continuing to work with imagery drawn from mythology, but with increasing complexity and assurance. Two large 2001 canvases, titled Adam and Eve, portray prototypes of masculine and feminine identity. Both subjects are shown in the confining embrace of a serpent. Adam, as the archetype of logical, active masculinity, has marshaled the snake's writhing body into a symmetrical form, muscularly containing it within the boundaries of the canvas, and, by implication, of the known world. But the effort has drained him of his identity and his countenance is defaced to the point where he becomes indistinguishable from the phallic tree of knowledge out of which he seems to be emerging. Eve, representing intuitive passive femininity, allows the snake to swirl chaotically around her and to reach beyond her known world. Eyes closed, she wears an expression of bliss.

The exhibition also included a number of landscapes, a relatively recent subject for Utter. Applying his characteristic materials and techniques to banal urban subjects such as garages and freeway underpasses, he arrives at richly textured canvases that verge on abstraction. Were it not for the title, the viewer might not recognize the central form in Bridge & Rain (2001). If the trails of dripping tar and shellac that run down the canvas suggest rain, they also evoke the leakage of the physical world into the metaphysical realm that this artist explores so intensely in his figurative work.

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