William Schaeuble, Coyote Season, 2024, oil on canvas, 50 X 42".
It’s tornado season, and the fish are biting. Or it’s dinnertime, and the boys are coming to fisticuffs in the yard. Carnies are rehearsing at the edge of town, lighting jokey little fires. And look over there: A coyote is mauling somebody, but in a cute way.
These are a few scenarios the twenty-something William Schaeuble conjured in “Fights,” a solo exhibition of his recent paintings. Born in Iowa and now based in Chicago, Schaeuble is a frugal surrealist of the Midwest. He repurposes empty fields and hunchbacked pastures as backdrops for quirky anecdotes about life in the sticks. Figures are distorted—long in the legs, boxy up top—while narratives are incongruous, even mystifying. When have you seen barn cats dance “Ring Around the Rosie” on their hind legs? In The Schaeuble Brothers Wrestling (all works 2024), a feline trio in the foreground seems to do just that. Behind them, three siblings, in trunks and nothing else, tussle in the plain outdoors.
You can’t look at these paintings and not spare a thought for Grant Wood, a fellow Iowan who was also prone to mythopoetic fancies. At times, Schaeuble’s subtle allusions—like the image of a snake plant, which calls to mind Wood’s 1929 painting of his mother—boom into outright homage, as in Portrait of the Artist’s Younger Brother, which looks like a nocturnal riff on Wood’s Arnold Comes of Age (Portrait of Arnold Pyle), 1930. Whereas Wood tends toward grandeur and decorative indulgence, Schaeuble heads in the opposite direction: into understated irony. His paintings are self-contained fables, insular and lean, wryly humorous. Like Wood, he insists that whatever we imagine as flyover country is actually a land ripe with vigorous symbolism.
If I’m making Schaeuble sound even accidentally polemical, then let me throw some cold water on the idea. His paintings have no agenda other than their own pleasure. They depict a world of almost folkloric simplicity. In Apple Thief, a shirtless man in blue jeans leans against a gnarled crone of a tree, feeding the namesake fruit to a goose. Another man, barefoot and toting a rifle, barrels downhill toward them with an absurdly elongated stride. Which of the three is the thief? Schaeuble’s illustrational style, reminiscent of that seen in children’s storybooks, lends that ambiguity the charm of a tall tale. He flirts with whimsy but doesn’t put a ring on it; what keeps his art just this side of twee is its wit and buoyant idiosyncrasy.
Exhibit A: Ladder Match, in which a troupe of men, amateur acrobats in denim, practice their acts in a country corral. Overhead, a stuntman dangles from a zip line, steering with what appears to be a briefcase; on the ground, his sidekick either shoves away the safety ladder or tries to steady it. Stray cats and birds loiter on stark amphitheater seats in the background. I haven’t even mentioned the steep gothic barn on the left, whose cutout window reveals a guitarist strumming to an audience of one. In this and other paintings, Schaeuble infuses regionalist iconography—oceanic swells of land, lone barns—with narrative absurdism.
Another influence rears his head: late Chicago artist Roger Brown, who likewise retooled regionalism into sardonic parables. Schaeuble borrows some of the Imagist’s stylistic signatures, including silhouettes and irradiated horizons. In Schaeuble’s Those Damned Jeans, a seated man finesses himself into a single pants leg while a posse of vigilantes approaches, firing arrows in a burlesque of Hollywood westerns. The horizon smolders with eerie phosphorescence. In Missing the Best Part (Theater Fight), the allusion to Brown is even craftier: A silhouetted figure throws a punch at another moviegoer; his ultra-elastic arm censors the breasts of a topless woman on-screen. The painting invokes Brown’s 1968 series of theater interiors, similarly droll and unreal.
Schaeuble wears his influences lightly. They’re more affectionate nods than stolen goods. As this exhibition demonstrated, his own style is well underway, as personal as it is eccentric. See, finally, Coyote Season, in which an artist, perhaps Schaeuble, paints a sitter while, in the near distance, coyotes menace bumbling stragglers. Whatever violence the exhibition’s title promised, Schaeuble’s world is cozy with mischief and tenderness. To quote poet Jack Gilbert: “No meanness, / just energy.”
