Sophia Leiby. The Drama of Leisure, 2013; installation view, Devening Projects + Editions, Chicago. Courtesy of Devening Projects + Editions.

Sofia Leiby‘s first solo exhibition in Chicago, titled The Drama of Leisure, consists of fourteen paintings and three runs of screen prints. Now on view at Devening Projects + Editions, Leiby’s paintings and drawings are clearly influenced by her experience as a printmaker. In most works, the artist paints as if the brush were a thick, wet crayon, and she sketches and fills with rapid marks more casual than expressive, each mark nearly uniform in width. Like her screen prints, the paintings (both those on canvas and paper) are built in colliding layers of shapes that often echo the painting’s edge, dodging it around the gutters, and which respond to earlier shapes below. There are differences and exceptions in the artist’s process—one painting, The Steps (2013), is far more painterly, while another, Untitled (2013), incorporates paper cutting and collage—but these basic formal traits unite the close-hung work. Closer examination reveals Leiby’s repetition of shapes across works, a recurrence that seeds a visual history through the show and gives a glimpse into the order of the works’ making.

This emphasis on process causes Leiby’s paintings to vibrate between the highly subjective territory normally associated with abstract painting and its near antithesis: the more distant and mechanical product of a conceptual system, with works bearing significance according to their point or path of origin. Taken individually, the presence of the artist’s hand, the suggestibility of her shapes, and the restraint with which they are worked suggest the former; taken together, they lean hard toward the latter, and are tipped further by the show’s title and accompanying statement.

Sophia Leiby. Untitled, 2013; mixed media on canvas; 22 x 18 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Devening Projects + Editions, Chicago.

The statement describes Leiby painting in her off hours and at home, her studio being at the moment a partition of her own bedroom. This is both an early-career necessity, limiting the size and kinds of materials available to her, and a location of her practice in both the time and space of leisure. She works on nights and weekends, as an unwinding ritual after long days and train rides, and as a form of recreation in its strictest definition. According to Leiby, this is more than a desire for creative diversity of labor or an escape from the grind of a day job. Her studio represents a longing for a different experience of time, one unstructured and associative, lacking purpose or effect. Her paintings, she suggests, are only the results of this ritual, the passive accumulation of her emphatic leisure.

Sophia Leiby. The Steps, 2013; mixed media on canvas; 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Devening Projects + Editions, Chicago.

Here Leiby’s impulses, if not her paintings themselves, enter into the active discourse on postindustrial labor as experienced in today’s network economy. Creative professionals are particularly tasked with the deeply alienating and bizarre responsibility for oneself as a brand, a personality, or otherwise marketable chunk of human capital. As more of our social and entertainment activity is mobilized for either our own or others’ interests (for example, when networking invades personal relationships, or when our hobbies or diversions are capitalized to generate valuable online content), one can find it a complex challenge just to trace the blurring line between productive labor and unproductive leisure. With so much else in an artist’s life productively structured, purposefully performed, and in general feeling like work, what could be more radical than insisting that the center of an artist’s practice—the work itself—is something else entirely?

Sophia Leiby. Sketch for Duck in Situ, 2013; mixed media on canvas; 12 x 9 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Devening Projects + Editions, Chicago.

It may be surprising that Leiby, a studio artist, can be comfortable with the marginal status of her studio output, or comfortable enough to incorporate this status as the concept of her work. However, the artist’s ambitions excel elsewhere: She is a writer, a curator, and perhaps most significantly co-founder (with Jason Lazarus) of Chicago Artist Writers, a platform for horizontal criticism between artists. She is certainly hard at work, wherever she locates her painting and drawing. Like the patterned studies of Michelle Grabner, arguably the quintessential many-hats Chicago artist, Leiby’s paintings seem also to occupy a quiet corner of a distributed practice, more inward-facing, and favoring the meditative space within recursive systems.

The Drama of Leisure was on view at Devening Projects + Editions through January 18, 2014.

David Schutter. AIC G, 2014; oil on linen; 16 x 14.5 in. Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

At first appearance, David Schutter’s paintings appear almost blank, somewhere between painterly gray monochromes, awfully dry and dead, and overwrought images obliterated into neutral tones. Closer up, the grays separate into more grays—a brighter golden, a deeper charcoal, a greenish dead-moss, and so on—while the seemingly uniform surface opens into a surprising depth of layered brushwork. Like his drawings, Schutter’s paintings are intense accumulations of curling touches, brushy attacks, and bits and clips of painting’s language of flourish. Describing only space, these expressive marks convey meaning abstractly, like gray and black nods without context.

Appreciating these somber works requires a little knowledge of their history. The title of this exhibition, What Is Not Clear Is Not French, is drawn from an essay written by the royalist writer Antoine de Rivarol (1753–1801). His famous essay, The Universality of the French Language, proudly presented French as a language epitomizing Enlightenment values while avoiding the pitfalls of other European languages: It lacked the hardness of German, the weakness of a polluted Italian, and the baseness and superfluity of English. The infallible French, meanwhile, embodied clarity, structure, and order, while yet preserving a lyrical grace. Typically of the time, and parallel to developments in French academic painting, de Rivarol was anxious to rationalize the beauty and effect of the French language, to measure and describe the logic of its romance, and to celebrate it within the charged arena of competing nationalisms.

David Schutter. What Is Not Clear Is Not French, 2014; installation view, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. Image courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

This impossible desire to codify expressive qualities, situated both conceptually and historically between Enlightenment’s ambition to know and a still-inchoate notion of romantic experience, has attracted Schutter’s attention before in the form of Charles Le Brun’s famous treatise, Conférence sur L’Expression. A landmark document in the French academy, Le Brun’s investigation into the psychology and aesthetic effect of human expressions led to an engineered guide for painters, complete with figures and diagrams for every conceivable emotion. For years afterward, a certain upturned brow and narrowed eyelid (for example) meant suspicion for the artists who deployed it in their works. In addition to speaking on the subject in 2011 at the University of Chicago (where Schutter also teaches)*, his work incorporates these elements of expression in a loose weave, interrupted and blended to create an uncertain insinuation of meaning.

David Schutter. L LB dc 59, 2011-2014; chalk and crayon on paper; 13.375 x 9.375 in. Image courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

The strongest tension in David Schutter’s paintings is between their historical referents and their contemporary interpretation. While the abstract drawings wear their history plainly in academic marks and moves, it is impossible to see Schutter’s paintings without the deep-set history and theory of monochrome abstraction—our own academy, perhaps, in which the flattened, negotiated space of Agnes Martin or the emotional deadness of Mark Rothko’s later works both feel nearer than anything in the salons of 18th-century Paris. Yet Schutter’s paintings insist on their history. Each is painted in memory of a specific art-historical work, and even made to the same scale, though the specifics are only suggested. We are asked to trust that the warm blacks of AIC G (2014) come from some work—a Corbet? a Corot?—as it was seen by the artist at the Art Institute of Chicago faithfully interpreted through his desaturating memory; likewise, we can assume that NGS C 3 (2009) originated at a different point of contemplation, perhaps in the National Gallery of Scotland. Unlike many other artists’ abstractions, our interpretations here are not entirely free.

Despite this play of abstraction and specificity, whether and to what degree the artist’s process of specific recollection manifests in the works themselves is a subject for debate. Clearer is Schutter’s insistence on painting’s evidentiary role in the history of western thought. His fusion of academic modes and devices prompts questions about today’s contemporary art: If painting is still a place where a culture’s ideals can manifest as values and theories, what might we learn from how we discuss painting today?

David Schutter: What Is Not Clear Is Not French is on view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery through May 31, 2014.

*Full disclosure: The author studied at the University of Chicago from 2011 to 2013 and was a former student of the artist.