Artist: Pieter Schoolwerth

Petzel presents Supporting Actor, an exhibition of painting, sculpture, film, and an architectural installation by New York-based artist Pieter Schoolwerth. The show is Schoolwerth’s third solo exhibition with Petzel. Spanning the entire gallery, Supporting Actor continues Schoolwerth’s exploration of abstracted figures and forms, utilizing both computer-generated (CG) and hand-made media. The exhibition includes the debut of a CG-animated film, made collaboratively with artist Phil Vanderhyden, and accompanied by a soundtrack and live performances by musician Aaron Dilloway.

Extending Schoolwerth’s adventurous experiments with figuration, Supporting Actor explores painting’s thorny relationship with technology while posing urgent questions regarding the status of the real in an age of simulation, online echo chambers, and escapist apathy. A mise en abyme of spaces and objects, the show is anchored by a scale model of a domestic bathroom in the South Gallery, turned on its side and opened like a book. The bathroom’s mirror opens to a tunnel, leading to a miniature model of the gallery space on the other side of the wall. Meanwhile, the CGI-animated film Supporting Actor screens on a loop in a black box theatre space in the West Gallery, offering a key to the exhibition’s forking and interconnected paths.

The film follows an animated avatar of Dilloway through several sets: a tiled bathroom, a club, and a space akin to a studio or gallery. Our story begins in the bathroom, where, as the protagonist brushes his teeth, the sound conjures anthropomorphic stains on the Celotex ceiling tiles. Suddenly, a stain above opens a portal, welcoming him into a fantastical club. Equal parts Star Wars cantina and psychedelic cabaret, the luminous environment pulses with stain-shaped figures, dancing ecstatically to Dilloway’s soundtrack.

Meanwhile, Schoolwerth’s large trompe l’oeil tableaus blur authentic and simulated gesture. To execute these dynamic works, Schoolwerth first paints small improvised compositions, titled Texture Tiles, inspired by the film. He then photographs and extrudes these into 3D relief models, into which he embeds the photographic fragments of the paintings. The file is then printed on canvas and rearticulated with a final hand-painted layer that, as Schoolwerth describes, “puts the paint back into the painting.”

If the original Texture Tile painting is thus lost in translation, transformed into its avatar, this complex process allegorizes painting’s uncertain contemporary state, where most works are viewed via screens as so many pixels, echoes—images once removed. Here, scale also plays a pivotal role. Magnified 1000%, a delicate stroke becomes an aggressive slash in its enlarged corollary: a caricature of Action painting, reflecting the glaring inflation of personal details online.

Such translation from private to public also mirrors the passage from the private world of the recreated bathroom to the model gallery, and the shift from the private small canvases to the public larger tableaus in which the translated image is recontextualized—literally blown out of proportion. Between these registers, the film’s Dilloway traverses a wormhole from the bathroom to the miniature gallery—a channel transforming frail matter into luminous digital sublimation and our private lives into public performance.

Through such feints and proxies, Supporting Actor plunges us into a labyrinth of connections and regresses—an echo of the mirage in which we increasingly live via online doubles. Yet Schoolwerth also insists on connecting this digital hallucination to its material underpinnings via a handful of paintings hung opposite their relief sculpture twins: the very CG models through which the canvases were composed. Dubbed Relief Routers these monochromatic works lead to a mixing board controlled by a four-foot-tall 3D-printed model of Dilloway, a fitting mascot for digital immersion. Like us, the grimacing figure orchestrates the hypnotic spectacle enveloping him, a space into which he willingly— joyfully—disappears.