Kenny Schachter
Jupiter | 55 Delancey Street
Through April 26, 2025
In Kenny Schachter's show at Jupiter gallery on the Lower East Side, I was struck by a sense memory—a visceral jolt of déjà vu. It was the feeling I had in the basement of my first New York apartment over a decade ago, when I looked up and realized all the piping above my head was covered in aging—and in places crumbling—asbestos insulation. It was as if my body, even before my mind, was telling me: Get out. This isn't good for you. This will cause you harm.
The surfaces of some paintings in "Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction” recall the texture of drop-ceiling tiles, stucco, and, yes, the wrapped asbestos insulation on boiler room steam pipes in decrepit, not-up-to-code New York basements. I would soon learn, from the press release, that the artist made the works in collaboration with Matr Labs, a company that "develops bespoke robotic hardware to transform digital imagery into richly textured oil paintings" (emphasis my own). But let's be clear: the uncanny valley of this gag-inducing texture is a bug, not a feature.
Three paragraphs in and I haven't described what the paintings in this show by the New York-based artworld fixture, self-styled provocateur, and NFT enthusiast are of or about. They are about nothing, mostly. Schachter serves up nothing a few different ways, and under scrutiny, the aesthetic and conceptual void behind the work only expands—a feat that is almost impressive.
