I'm drawn that way

Amanita is pleased to present I’m drawn that way, Adrian Schachter’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, at the gallery’s temporary space in Venice Beach, California.

15% of sales will be donated to Grief and Hope Los Angeles.

We would like to thank Charles Arnoldi for welcoming us into his space.

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The new large-scaled paintings by Adrian Schachter in his exhibition I’m drawn that way are cut through with subtle and cunning invocations of the Los Angeles mythos. It’s his first show in the capital of cinema, and after a lifetime of building up an idea of L.A. in his mind, Schachter has conjured a series of works that dives headfirst into the city’s reliance on legend to tell its own story.

Schachter trained AI by feeding it complicated prompts, creating outlines of the dreamworlds that he would then paint on canvas—and further investigating how several speculative histories can tie together to create the objective story of a place. Schachter specifically chose these subjects because of their relationship to truth, their footing in the paranormal, their insistence on faith. What happens when the brains behind computer learning add their own sense of the metaphysical to the proceedings—and then the narrative is scrambled once again by the artist reimagining the renderings?

These paintings embody the ethos of their distinctly L.A. landscapes: all these places have been somehow shaped by the Tinseltown image machine. Take the pink-washed new work Zoltan at Jungleland USA. You’ve never heard of Jungleland, but starting in the 1920s it had elephants, lions, tigers, camels, apes—nearly 2,000 animals at its peak—across farmland that’s now the affluent valley neighborhood of Thousand Oaks.

In the 1960s, Hollywood pinup Jayne Mansfield was in the middle of a photoshoot at Jungleland when her toddler son was mauled by a lion, nearly killing him. What fascinates Schachter isn’t the grisly beast-on-baby violence involving a starlet. That’s tabloid stuff. It’s how the boy was saved: the Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, a notorious friend of Mansfield’s, led a Satanic prayer at the top of Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco, and the boy’s condition improved rapidly.

The painting nods to James Ensor’s Tribulations of St. Anthony, but instead of featuring the Egyptian monk battling the devil’s sea monsters and dragons, Schachter gives the saintly treatment to a lion-mauled boy who gets healed by an agent of Satan infatuated with a movie star. Ensor is a clear touchstone for Schachter, but so are the artists Ensor himself was looking toward. The Belgian master’s depiction of the devil and the coptic saint was based on Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting of the same abbot shunning society… and that was in turn informed by Hieronymous Bosch’s depiction of the figure, with the sloping green leading to a monastery in the background. Schachter’s Los Angeles is not unlike the hyperreal Boschian and Brueghelian dioramas of a human battling an underworld deity—and to stage a hell-defying stunt like that is a big-budget Hollywood production if I’ve ever heard of one. It’s a show of hallucinatory canvases that use artificial intelligence to render Hollywood arcana through the likes of Ensor—and it's this feedback loop of representational self-invention that fuels Schachter’s paintings. Doubloons Lie Sewn in Sand depicts what at first glance is entirely an AI concoction: a boat is rearing its bow over a great expanse of sand, a shipwreck in the middle of the desert, an impossibility in the non-online world. Except it’s not quite a pure fable—for centuries there have been whispers and eyewitness accounts of a Spanish Galleon that sank in a now-perished part of the Salton Sea. What a deliciously Boschian setting, the Salton Sea, a California body of water that over the years has been subjected to near-Biblical plagues. In the 1990s, 10,000 pelicans fell from the sky after eating salt-poisoned fish from the highly salinated lake.

In the painting, the legend of the boat is made real: the doubloons from the galleon ready to be plundered. The same with the secret history of Mount Shasta, a dormant volcano and one of the highest peaks in the state, in the painting Mount Shasta Interior. For centuries tall tales have proliferated about the existence of a secret city within the mountain. A prospector said he discovered in its hills a hidden mausoleum strewn with gold—and then that prospector disappeared. Others claim that there’s a city called Telos and it’s a portal to Lemuria, a secret continent that lies beneath the Indian Ocean. In Mount Shasta Interior the portal is open for the figures who climb up the adjoining crags to transcend to a subterranean land. Like the other paintings, the scene is chosen for its relationship to myth: it’s a depiction of a door to a world below our world, and it was created not by man but by machine. But in a way, that kind of creation, when it’s focused on the DNA of Los Angeles—where reality is recreated on film sets and fed back to the masses on screens—is a commentary on the act of believing what you see. And in Schachter’s electric supernatural paintings, the actors can be anyone looking at them.

– Nate Freeman