Peter Schuyff at Nicole Klagsbrun

In his first solo exhibition in New York since 2001, Peter Schuyff employed a collection of small found paintings as supports for new works dated 2007. Bearing the patina of age and sometimes signed and dated by their original authors, they include such traditional subjects as landscape, portraiture, marine, still life and genre. Some are well-intentioned copies of recognizable works of the past.

The found paintings are neither appropriated in the manner of Sherrie Levine nor offered as a celebration of thrift-store kitsch in the manner of Jim Shaw. Schuyff adds to them a variety of simple forms recalling drafting templates in smooth and high-relief oil that in some instances suggest large buttons. He occasionally applies windowlike but rounded-at-the-corners shapes in red, blue and gold, while other applications recall the eyepieces of binoculars. Still other devices seem to tilt into or away from the picture plane to occasionally comic or poignant effect.

At roughly 28 by 38 inches, the two largest paintings are copies of a pair of Boucher works, Girl Resting, here named Green Quack for the dominant hue of the copy, and Diana Getting Out of Her Bath, which Schuyff titles simply Quack, in both instances alluding to the signature "Quak" that appears on these copies. Both works are covered with ranks of varied circles. Here and in several other paintings in the exhibition Schuyff lays down a penciled grid or the sighting device of cross hairs as though to locate in the composition intersections for the subsequent placement of his relief devices. The classic landscapes titled Lying Down 1 and Lying Down 2 are each rotated one turn from the horizontal, and in this perpendicular skew are embellished with relatively massive concentrically circular devices that obscure most of the ground while opening at the center to reveal a very small--and for Schuyff crucial-element of the painting.

In a separate space, Schuyff presented 23 works on paper, each consisting of geometric forms painted in black and white gouache on a found drawing. Neoclassicism distinguishes many of these handsome drawings by forgotten artists of previous centuries. Among them is a 12-by-10-inch study of a winged bust, to which Schuyff has added vertical bars that seem to dance across the surface. Other devices are circular, like those on the paintings, and some are rectilinear, perhaps drawn from the abstractions of Mondrian, arranged in relation to a penciled grid. Among other drawings of interest, nederland1 and nederland2 are figured with windmills surmounted by what resemble bar codes. Dutch-born and raised in Vancouver where he studied and taught art, this former East Village painter now lives and works in Amsterdam.

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