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<\/a><\/p>\nA 2012 profile in\u00a0Southwest Art\u00a0tells the coming-of-age story of Billy Schenck, painter of the southwest now exhibiting at Modern West Fine Art: a Midwest boy who learned how to draw by copying comic books, in the mid-1960s he heads to art school, where he discovers the works of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, becomes an urbane and \u201chip\u201d artist, soaks up the angst of Francis Bacon and spends his spring break in New York as a crew member for Warhol\u2019s\u00a0Exploding Plastic Inevitable; but when a friend invites him to the spaghetti western\u00a0A Fistful of Dollars, he also discovers the West \u2014 or rediscovers it, for he had spent his summers at an uncle\u2019s place in Lander, Wyo., and remembers to this day a trip to the Acoma Pueblo when he was 5 \u2014 and decides to merge the two; and so after school he goes to Manhattan, where he takes Sergio Leone\u2019s contemporary approach to the genre of western films and turns it to painting. Though sold-out shows soon follow, his take on the West ultimately proves too romantic for the cerebral cosmopolitans and his New York career seems to end almost as quickly as it began. So then he truly heads West, to New Mexico, to the Southwest of Taos and Santa Fe. And he hasn\u2019t left since; but neither has he left his days of Pop behind, and his work has been pulled between desert reverence and pulp play ever since.<\/p>\n Billy Schenck: West of the Wasatch\u00a0features about 15 pieces, big and small, representative of the artist\u2019s work in general. The paintings are executed in an almost completely flat manner, calling to mind silkscreens (a la Warhol), comic books or paint-by-numbers kits; which is not to say that they are simple, for the compositions are sophisticated and the palette of burnt secondary colors striking.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you\u2019re looking for scattered sagebrush and majestic skies, carved mesas and stunning sunsets, you\u2019ll find plenty of it here. You\u2019ll also find plenty of heroic figures, usually on horseback, framed by huge cumulus clouds \u2014 a trope so frequently employed it seems almost clumsy, until one sees the paintings that subvert the same trope, where, say, a rider in a work like \u201cStudy for Burning Daylight\u201d casts a shadow across the sky and clouds, turning it into a backdrop rather than an actual setting. You won\u2019t find this tongue-in-cheek attitude in Schenck\u2019s images of Native Americans, however. Tightly composed, they are much more reverential and traditional: blanket-clad individuals, with pots, at peace in their dramatic landscapes. He seems, then, to be having it both ways, a touch of reverence here, and a dash of romanticism there, but just as frequently a wink and a nod to the underpinnings of the genre he has made his home.<\/p>\n His most playful works are the \u201ccaption paintings,\u201d which he has been working on since 2000. Some of these feature speech bubbles a la Roy Lichtenstein, but the two at Modern West feature more true captions, related to but not directly involved with the painting below. It is not entirely clear what to make of them, however. When one says that \u201c43% of American Men Are Killed By Their Wives,\u201d are we supposed to think that of the men killed in America 43% suffer mariticide; or that a full 43% of the male population is dying at the hands of their spouse? And a glance at the wistful look of the Native American in \u201cIn the Distant Past Only Indians Witnessed Heroic Sunsets\u201d might make our knee jerk towards a simplistic reading of noble native vs. unwelcome arriv\u00e9e; but this Indian is dressed in clothes from Sears & Roebuck, not the distant past; and that \u201conly\u201d is ambiguous, dictating different meanings depending on whether or not it stresses itself or the word that follows. Whether intentional or not this type of ambiguity serves these pieces well, making them stick in your mind longer than they would if the captions were more facile.<\/p>\n The most revealing pieces in the exhibit are the three large black and white photographs that hang on the gallery\u2019s north wall, easily missed when heading to the arrangement of oil paintings in the gallery\u2019s center. \u201cCowboys in the Sky\u201d shows a pair of riders in an open range, a Monument Valley-esque butte in the distance. To our sophisticated, Photoshop-trained generation, the artifice of the image is quickly apparent: the horsemen are darker than the rest of the image, upon which they cast no discernible shadow, and the slant of horse and rider suggest they are descending a slope while the image shows them above a flat field of sagebrush. It is an obvious construct rather than a pretense at reality.<\/p>\n
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