Josepha Gutelius’s fractured narratives seem channeled from the future. Rejecting artistic conventions at every turn—though she frequently quotes from these conventions, as in Virtual Amusement Park, in which the park is represented by a jumble of abstract colored shapes floating in an orange sky above a photographic image of two girls, who stand dizzily before a vast urban panorama cast into relief by black, inky shadows—the artist conceives her canvases not so much as a window as a wormhole. Lurid, radioactive colors are often combined with black, suggesting toxic atmospheres and the void of space, while intricate, filigree-like areas of abstract patterning, akin to the pixels on a screen, intrude upon her tonal figures. Her shifting images seem to slither and scintillate, as if they were particles in a quantum field, constantly in a state of becoming. The stylistic disjunctions, the constant trade-off between representation and abstraction, Pop irony and the cosmological, close ups and vertiginous space, hint at a kind of strange energy exchange reflective of an irrational physics, a new take on reality. 

Gutelius’ complex narratives, which resonate with visual puns and often evolve from free association, reflect her former career as a playwright, poet, and essayist. Some of her poems are prescient in describing her process. One is entitled “New Year’s Transformers,” which reads in part: 

Out of body, the strange apparatus divides
air from air. It resembles a mouth, an opening. Inhale. 

Not really a mouth, but there are hands stitching together a summer cloud
in a sky of frayed ends.
Not really hands, not a sky, either. 

Using art supplies bequeathed to her many years before by Robert Arner, an artist who served as her mentor and former teacher, Gutelius began to paint in 2015, at age 62, and in the few years since has attracted regional and national attention, with numerous exhibitions and awards. Her output has been prodigious: during a recent visit to Gutelius’ attic studio in the historic Tudor estate in Saugerties, N.Y., where she and her husband reside, dozens of canvases, large and small, covered the walls and floor. The images teem with content culled from personal photos, the Internet, and print media, a mash up of angled figures and silhouettes, some posed on skyscraper balconies, in art museums, seated on park benches, floating in pools or disintegrating into black space; close ups of faces or other body parts; family gatherings, imagined as vertiginous montage-like compositions in garish colors; guitar-toting punk and pop performers; pedestrians passing graffiti covered brick walls; and landscapes and sunsets depicted at a remove, as if viewed through a camera or screen, in worm-like flat squiggles of color. Sunbathers relax as planets collide, a billionaire laughs as he floats in space, and a hefty nude woman lounges not in a pool, but in a puddle. Collectively the paintings function as a kind of fractured funhouse mirror, flashing back at us our voyeuristic obsessions, our isolation, our fantasies of celebrity and rebellion, our boredom and mental wanderings, our phantasmagoric daydreams. 

Just as her paintings explode the notion of stasis, in art, life, and contemporary social, technological, and political intercourse, so the artist herself moves freely between edgy literary narrative and vivacious, inventive image making. She traffics in the existential anxieties of the contemporary self, pummeled with messages from an omnipresent electronic media and confronted with such crises as generative adversarial networks—what are called “Deep Fakes,” fabricated but real-looking videos in cyberspace—which are beyond anyone’s control, the unleashing of fascist forces in our politics, extreme weather events and the prospect of ecological collapse. Gutelius works in series whose titles and subject matter reflect these anxieties and the need to develop new defenses. Her approach also points to the impossibility of comprehending the whole; it’s in fragmented images that the artist conveys the truth of experience, filled with hints of the underlying matrix that controls and determines how we think and perceive. 

Paintings of classical statuary—posed against black backgrounds, in some cases framed by skyscrapers, their beautiful proportions interrupted by tiny rows of Mondrian-like squares, or rows of dashes, as if they were a crackling Times Square electronic billboard—are part of the Roman Elegies, while lone seated figures, their backs to the viewer, in urban parks and plazas belong to the Silence of Nowhere. Gutelius’ latest series, Inhabiting New Earth, reconstructs recreational activities as scary excursions into memory. In Hikers, a sunlit young woman seated against a tree on the edge of the forest is juxtaposed with an ominous poltergeist-like figure floating in a shaded area that has the depths of outer space, more abyss than restful glade. In many of the paintings, viewing is conceived as a kind of surveillance. The notion of pleasure is subverted, portraying youthful figures at leisure as vulnerable targets in sinister atmospheres. 

That Gutelius’ art is so in step with the zeitgeist of our times is uncanny given the simplicity of her means and medium: acrylic paint, watercolor and ink are applied in layers, wiped out, and repainted. Meandering lines, patterns of dots, and other marks are juxtaposed against spectral, tonal images. She hints at her painting process in this excerpt from her poem “The Music Chamber (Why I Am Not Matisse)” : 

The curtains are half-drawn. A lovely noon. I haven't decided 

how many colors to let in.
So far the girls are huddled ink --
in a stupor maybe
from my endless wavering. (Should they wear pink? Are they any less innocent if I smear them in gray wash?) 

There is a graphic quality to the work, which relates to her Comix, graphic narratives that combine words and drawings. The combination of photographic-like images, sometimes blurred or in gray and black and accents of vivid color against black or white, also upends conventional notions of stylistic purity, lampooning a central tenet of Modernism, and dissolves the boundary between high and low culture. Her smooth surfaces are devoid of brushstrokes, and while the deconstructions in her narratives might seem to relate to collage, they are more akin to montages and cinematic dissolves. Her squiggles, patterning, and swirls of color are painted in the same deadpan manner as her figures. 

Indeed, a favorite target of Gutelius is the art world with its preening self- importance and fixation on commodity, its ivory tower of separation from the teeming chaos of the street even as she depicts the elegance and Zen-like serenity of its spaces. Besides photography, her visual language, while much influenced by Gerhard Richter (especially in her early paintings and drawings) and Sigmar Polke, is derived from graffiti, cinema, advertising, and the stark electric lighting of punk stages and urban streets, which transforms and subsumes the aesthetics of high art. 

Never proscriptive or agenda driven—though its nightmarish displacements surely constitute a critique of the forces that have led to society’s plight and threatened dissolution—her work functions as its own psychic channel, multifarious and all- inclusive, meshing interior states with public spaces, by turns intimate and generic. In her poetry and her art, Gutelius creates new states of consciousness by merging opposites, just as we view close ups, in quick succession, of the planets, gun-toting Proud Boys, yowling musicians, a wolf, the city skyline—whatever--in the palms of our hands. Through the force of her imagination and meticulous craft, Gutelius documents our spiritual unease—our addiction to spectacle and distractedness, the bating of our obsessions by monolithic powers, the futility of rebellion, our loneliness and fear of annihilation.