With a mood that often suggests a trippy twenty-first-century recapitulation of Richard Hamilton’s iconic 1956 proto-Pop collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, Pieter Schoolwerth’s newest works propose a world swollen to the point of disfigurement with the flotsam and jetsam of the capitalist now. The consumerist heartache at the core of Hamilton’s sardonic dream home was founded on a welter of newfangled appliances, product logos, and hypertrophically idealized male and female forms. For their part, Schoolwerth’s virtuoso paintings swarm with low-budget products hailing from the virtual realm—digital bodies and settings bought off commercial CGI marketplaces such as TurboSquid and then subjected to an array of deformations that disorientingly toggle, like so much of our contemporary image sphere, between the repellent and the mesmerizing, the funny and the ominous.
— Jeffrey Kastner
