Dana Schutz’s Face Eater is a painting of contrasts: boldly executed in Schutz’s unmistakable trademark style, it provokes both revulsion and intrigue. The young human, gender being rather difficult to tell given the drastic perversion of the facial features, is roughly figured in broad, expressive brushstrokes and a subtly muted palette. The face, if it can reasonably be described as such, is all chin with only a gaping mouth full of equine size teeth, two eyeballs hovering in their “normal” location, and an incredibly suggestive phallic tongue. On the one hand, Schutz has painted a self-destructive, a potentially psychopathic individual hell-bent on devouring its own face. On the other, one could understand this individual to be nourishing itself, as any one must, and doing so in the most quintessentially American fashion possible – self-made and self-nourished.

This process of creative destruction, both breaking down and then (re)building back up, is frequently addressed in Schutz’s oeuvre. Indeed, the very process of artistic creativity can, and often will, follow such a trajectory. Each of her characters, over whom she exercises omniscience and omnipotence dictating their every move, exists within their own world bordered by the frame. Schutz has imbued them with a seeming sense of self-awareness and self-sufficiency. The Face Eater itself looks beyond the confines of its frame, maybe considering making some move, some advancement; however, it is only its creator, the artist, who can ever enact any change. Schutz, playing by her own rules, blurs the reality where life and art converge through her portal-like canvases. At once real and imagined, the mutated figure consolidates figuration and abstraction, as if the result of a monstrous experiment. The effect of this visual and kinetic collision is of a vision abandoned, unbounded, and limitless.