Dressing the Void: Entanglements of Allusion and Illusion in the Paintings of Jody DeSchutter

I: ALL AND NOTHING

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. Which is not to say that emergence happens once and for all, as an event or as a process that takes place according to some external measure of space and of time, but rather that time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future.

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning(2007).


What came before before?

It’s the $64,000 question that has baffled and badgered an array of physicists, mathematicians and astronomers, with the ramifications of the various arguments it raises, and concepts it articulates, re-shaping previously impenetrable threads of thought and theory - be they earthly, interstellar or philosophical - transforming what was once presumed certainty into now assumed dubiety. Before something there must have been nothing, yet some argue that such nothingness ‘existed’ not in or as an absolute vacuum but instead as a quantum state of gravitational forces, so that the ‘big bang’ was not an explosion, but rather an implosion that triggered not a bang but a bounce from nothing to something. Nothingness merely buzzed silently within the invisible hum of possibility. Then there are those who argue that ‘existence’ emanates from neither bang nor bounce but bubbles: pockets of pent-up energy that remain absent until they decay into presence, proposing our universe be best understood as a multiverse, born from and issuing an eternal inflation. As we delve deeper, the theories of our (pre)-beginnings become ever stranger. Conformal cyclic cosmology suggests that nothingness - that state devoid of and denying mass, space and even time – is merely the conclusion of all matter: the icy infinite expanse of emptiness thus becomes the mathematical twin of the hot, dense, microscopic state of a new ‘big bang’ (aeons) from whence it came. Nothing thus feeds something; life emerges from death. Professor Stephen Hawking would not even think about what came before the ‘big bang’ because he argued that given the inextricable link between space and time, asking what happened to space before time had even begun was a little like asking ‘what’s north of the North Pole’. The absence of time thus shapes nothingness, even if it is meant to remain shapeless. Finally, there is ‘string theory’ which states that our current notions of space and time offer only four dimensions in a multidimensional bulk of space in which we exist but do not experience or comprehend. Bangs, bounces or bubbles of origination thus occur because of these parallel membranes of inexplicable multidimension colliding with each other, without our knowledge of them, determining atomic genesis from the dimensional concussion of nothingness. Welcome to the void.

What came before our understanding of understanding is therefore nebulous, cryptic, invisible, silent, slippery and surreal. But this curious pulse of ‘pre-epistemology’ or ‘pre-hermeneutics’ beats even as we struggle to say how and why it does and it is this multidimensional, multi-laminated state of being and nothingness, failure and transcendence that is the void in question which fuels the investigation of Jody DeSchutter’s latest body of paintings. They poetically dress, address and redress the void as a sublime paradox, a haunting enigma or a hieroglyphic language of searching marks on a quest for shape or form that ultimately announces itself as elasticity, inchoateness and anomaly privileged over space, time or dimension. These are paintings that seek out some sense of allusion or concreteness from the mystery and convolution of the Quantum vocabulary or ‘scape yet are forced to dip into sacred waters of illusion, imagination and importation as a way of grappling with the complexity – unreality, even – of that Quantum experience. So it is that DeSchutter’s silky strokes seem hover between the sovereignty of registration and the synergy of their inexorable entanglement, morphing between painted vignettes and painterly vocabularies known and imagined; presented and performed.

If the subject (and manner of its execution) of DeSchutter’s latest paintings betrays an entanglement between allusion and illusion or simplicity and complexity, then the bedrock of her own enterprise likewise reveals an imbroglio of several disciplines, resisting any one singular language, practice or inspiration, that presents itself as practice fizzing with possibility. Her creative endeavour embraces painting, performance, spoken word, poetry, sound, sculpture and music, all of which (as individual pursuits) feed back into one another, nourishing a smorgasbord of making and meaning that forever chimes, connects and converses with itself. DeSchutter’s enterprise is a game with no endgame; a surface of sound as form by colour that both creates and confronts landscapes of paradox and quarrel, always evolving, devolving and resolving in never-ending curlicues of self-sponsorship and reciprocity. These loops of intent and execution - synapses of synaesthesia; modems of metamorphosis - nurture and confront, correlate and discombobulate in equal measure. So it is that the very mechanics of DeSchutter’s artistic plurality are perfectly placed for her to contemplate, then interrogate the void. That which is both all and nothing and which demands of those who dare engage with it the rhythm and poetry of sight and insight to properly, eloquently dress it.


II: SINS AND MIRACLES

In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world ... all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.

John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality (1984).

The largest painting in DeSchutter’s exhibition, Dressing The Void, is the rich and complex work, A sin and a miracle spring from the same fonte, often exchanging clothes (2026). It sets both the artist and her exhibition’s agenda: to unravel, suspend and then dress a void that plays hide-and-seek with its viewer in constantly-shifting planes and frames of paradox and reflection, as positions (formal and theoretical) become super-positioned, morphing lines into marks into fields of colour only to see such coalescence disentangle once more into particles of moment and making. Figures ebb, then spike - inflate then emanate - in waves of watery abstraction that seem to celebrate their momentary signification before sloughing back into the puzzle of pattern and the pattern of puzzle that sustains the void.

The moment one enters this painting, DeSchutter makes it abundantly clear that a quark and quiz of matter and meaning is at play. Voiced as mark, experienced as moment and haunting as message, the artist unveils a paradigmatic void where truth, assumption and bearing all melt into one another. The central horizontal axis of the composition bifurcates the painting into two phrases of both space and time: one experienced, the other remembered; one enacted, the other refracted. This horizon between a proposed reality and its supposed simulacrum feels like it stages a simple act of reflection, yet it does not. Even as colours mirror themselves, gathered up and propelled by DeSchutter’s graphic choreography, the entanglement between the two opposites remains dislocated. Line thus behaves like light - both particular and universal – building platform and protagonist in the same way and offering no distinction between that which is concrete or echoed.

Like the hungry ouroboros, DeSchutter’s surface feeds yet consumes itself – a song both paean and dirge – so that moments of chromatic, linear or compositional congress conjugate themselves simultaneously in tenses past, present and future. The void thus exists in the painting’s visual struggle, where figuration attempts to distil, even quell abstraction and where dimensionality curtsies to a Quantum alphabet of glyph and graph that sounds the composition’s irreverent, energetic fizz. The artist’s dressing of it – performed by multiple figures that look like believers dipped in The Ganges or The Jordan – does not declare the void to be manipulated or understood, rather it serves to amplify our inability to gain any purchase on the cryptic nature of the void and the Quantum experience it alludes to in illusion, so that, ultimately, the painting yields the sinful, unadulterated joy of paint, colour, line and their coordination. A state and statement that, like the quanta that describes the totality of phenomena only in opposition to themselves, delights as both haptics and optics, affording a cadence of concurrence that usurps the surface’s need for structure and even solidity. The sin of looking thus becomes the miracle of meaning; an arc that sets forth two different patterns of persuasion but which, paradoxically, remain ever entangled as quanta banging, bouncing and bubbling in and as DeSchutter’s inquisitive practice of painting.


III: DRAPING SPACETIME

I call it drapery, but... in Rogier’s hands it became something much more than that, namely a way of giving shape to a feeling: grief without end.

Laura Cumming, “Drapery and the secret history of painting” in Christie’s Magazine (online), March 2016

A sin and a miracle spring from the same fonte, often exchanging clothes marks out a topography of opposition, where binary thrusts seek to divide the composition formally, emotionally and philosophically, but which never quite comes to fruition because of the magnetic connection DeSchutter evinces between figure and ground, with both going with a compositional flow that carries object and subject together as one experience. Yet even as the distinction between entity and reflection is both apparent but negated by our act of looking, oxymorons do abound, streaming different tributaries of signification that extend into contests of belief systems, morality, politics and the simple reality (or not, as the Quantum understanding of it may posit) of life versus death. All of this is transcribed in one consistent feature that appears in nearly all the exhibited works: drapery.

Just as the painting’s horizon marks a separation between land and water, so too does drapery signify the meeting point of two other realms – mortal and divine. If we consider the often sinusoidal drapery donned by the Virgin Mary in any number of Renaissance depictions of her, the agitation of her drapery seeks to describe her physical and emotional turmoil as mother whilst also alluding to her own journey of divination as saint. The twist and turns of DeSchutter’s drapery coil itself around her figures, fleshing out presence (and thus figurative independence from the ground it occupies) yet issuing a compositional coupling between the figure and ground, in equal measure. These are drapes that consequently adumbrate – and connect – the poles of life and death; particle and wave; positive and negative; perspective and relativity, all of which is carried by the figure only for that figure to seep back into the ground – inflected or reflected - further illuminating the cosmic cycle of nothingness to substance to its transubstantiation into another (or back to the very same) realm of uncertainty.

DeSchutter’s insistent drapery – especially since it is positioned on the boundary between earth and water – speaks to another specific protagonist, this time purloined from a different set of myths penned by Ovid in his Metamorphoses: Narcissus. Now the edge between soil and liquid is transformed into deltas of psychological tension; the point where ego and id confront one other in a pool of ineluctable desire, addled by the grief of its own imperviousness. Narcissus’ burden was the stuff of dreams for everyone else. Cursed with extraordinary beauty, Narcissus rejected the advances of everyone who approached him and instead fell in love with his own reflection. Ovid’s tale and its (anti)-hero is the origin of the personality disorder, narcissism: a condition marked by a need for attention and admiration and an inability to empathise with others. In many depictions of Narcissus in art history, the figure is shown either wearing or holding drapery. Caravaggio’s take on the myth from c. 1597-99 and now in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Rome cleverly invests the imagistic and indexical energy of drapery into the figure’s shoulders; their actual ripple further rippled in their clear, watery echo. His sin (a masturbatorial, destructive self-indulgence) is articulated by drapes directly cradling the agency of Narcissus’ gaze that, in their reflected, impenetrable alterity also convey the miracle of life, albeit one paralysed by an all-too familiar yearning for a love that, alas, can never materialise.

Drapes thus act as the conduit between space and time, folding both in on each other to illustrate Einstein’s understanding of spacetime. DeSchutter’s drapes press down on space, folding dimensions of exterior and interior into a multifaceted expression of being, slowing down time, and thus the tempo of her compositional dynamo. Even as it initiates envelopment, these figures are not cocooned by such folds of spacetime. Rather they are dressed in an agitation that speaks to the beauty of their grievous state: an immortal reverberation of flummox that flips between self and other and flops between the gravity and tempo of the void that draws them ever closer to an ending yet to begin or a beginning yet to end.


IV: SIMPLIFYING COMPLEXITY - AN EYE FOR AN I

In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929).

Misplaced Concreteness (2025) takes its title from the concept authored by Alfred North Whitehead in 1927 or 1928. The theory is itself a fallacy; a philosophical error that occurs when we privilege an idea or model over a concrete, physical reality. The fallacy warns against confusing the intellectual(ised) over the actual terrain of reality. Abstraction – in theoretical or mathematical terms – is employed to make a complex universe more digestible intellectually. However, in breaking down such complex ideas, one must not forget that such abstractions are but abbreviations of a wider reality or realities that often sit beyond our current intellectual capacity. Our ability to filter such texture should not result in its replacement but rather be used as a preface or synopsis to the complex realities they purport to summarise. Simplifying complexity is thus not the goal but the process; it can help dress the void, but it cannot solve its cosmic riddle. Even as we seek to establish some sense of permanency out of the flux generated by the Quantum field, so must we embrace that flux because it is there that the real dialogue unfolds between object and subject, cause and effect, colouring our understanding of a litany of realities that intersect with one another like melding universes or dimensions.

DeSchutter’s painting sits in the dichotomy between flux and permanence; the former issuing a planar and linear discombobulation of the figure and the latter offering an attempted permanency as provided by the formalism of a grid that, in turn, speaks to the tessellation and design of R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. Figures seem to float across an expanse of blue that suggests the environment is made up of water – a distinction further lent weight by the refraction and elongation of the figures’ limbs, suggesting we are either observing a reflection from above or looking up whilst immersed in water. Interiority and exteriority are now deliberately – and delightfully – confused, so whilst we are comforted by the artist’s delineation of space, figure and action – all being known structures - we also know that such registration is impossible to achieve, at least without the patronage and propulsion of the far more cryptic vocabulary of Quantum exchange which enables nothing to become something and exist simultaneously in different dimensions and times. All the time.

So it is that DeSchutter does not shy away from the innate complexity of the image and object - as cypher and platform. She has created an ambiguous space that not only declares it, but revels in such estranged ambiguity. We remain unsure as to what we are looking at as well as how we should look, so that the very act of observation – the gaze – comes under scrutiny. The artist very cleverly does this by conflating the dynamic of optics with the establishment and nurture of selfhood: both prone to flux as they seek permanency; both fusing the interior with the exterior. One an eye; the other, I. Note the convex shape – or at least its optical illusion – of DeSchutter’s support, made further curious by the impossibly stretched limbs and the geodesic design that seems to leap over the top edge of the canvas. Like Jan van Eyck’s famous mirror confirming his own identity in his The Arnolfini Portrait (1434, London, National Gallery), perspective and structure expand then implode (in true Quantum style) yet identity and purpose remain. The shape of the canvas also mimics that of an eye, with the trails of both figure, geodesic dome, environment and the runny delineation of their reflection assuming the roles of ocular blood vessels and capillaries. Even as DeSchutter makes a relatively simple composition come to life, it is the complexities of its status as an object, lens and her synthesis of the two into a drama of looking that determines the struggle yet triumph of selfhood, fuelling the puzzle of this painting, its tension of tenses and the loopy threads of spacetime that extend and contain it (and us).


V: LOOPS OF PERCEPTION AND FAITH

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958).

Quantum mechanics challenges the very basic principle that a ‘thing’ has an objective reality independent of our observation of it. You may be reading these words at home (if so, well done you) but now take a moment to think about Big Ben, the large clock tower overlooking the Houses of Parliament in London. You have likely seen it in person and countless time more on the television. You know its shape, form, location, function and the sound it makes when its bells toll out the time. So, it exists. But does it? If you cannot perceive it physically, what happens to its phenomenological status and, by extension, its claim to be objectively real? The Quantum theory suggests otherwise, stating that it is our interaction with the universe that dictates our reality: through perception and observation we create the ‘thingness’ of things and the outcome of events, collapsing infinite possibilities of time, space and outcome into the concrete reality we observe and experience. Big Ben may currently be a large carrot instead of a clock tower and you cannot be 100% sure that that is not the case. Nor should you. This wobble of reality, and its association with the dynamics of perception, is not new. The eighteenth-century philosopher, George Berkeley famously asked if a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Physically, it does. Metaphysically, perhaps it does not. In the Quantum universe, there was never a tree in the first place, just the infinite possibility of it. The ‘sound’ it makes when falling is not definite but rather a wave of sonic possibilities – sounding and not sounding at the same time – spreading through Berkeley’s forest like a blur of probabilities. Itself another haze, looping between probabilities of clarity and obscurity. And on and on, ad infinitum, the conundrum expands.

Such choreography of perception and possibility informs DeSchutter’s A mirage that perceived itself (2025). The painting initially unveils itself in easily readable terms, with understood elements of figures occupying a ground. Upon closer inspection, however, those elements become less understood, more abstract; more Quantum. Faces swish into abbreviation with nary a flick of the brush. Bodies dislocate then reform, gaining limbs, losing heads. A ground that at first appears aqueous and fluent, bobbing between reflection and inflection, soon betrays its gluey depth, capturing then confining an already denatured delineation and sucking that into its magmatic eddies of sticky pattern. Bodies become self, environment and other, dependent upon our observation of them. Form - and thus intent – shifts, both as and on a surface that quarrels with itself yet, in one ravishing ‘scape of painterly performance and preparation, also elevates it in curious, cunning harmony. The viewer’s arc of looking is now further stretched, resulting in a suspension of belief and disbelief made more mellifluous and ironic. As figures gather into a cultish hemisphere, dipping into baptismal waters of regeneration, DeSchutter cleverly loops an endless myriad of possibilities - visual and indexical – that offers momentary synapses of nexus and realisation, only to drift back into a watery blur of permutation. This painting powerfully declares that seeing is believing, but only as a notion that twists in on itself like a Möbius strip. To observe is to give life to a ‘thing’ and your experience of ‘it’. To believe one must therefore observe first, so the Quantum riddle therefore tests the leap of faith many ‘believers’ make with their various religions. DeSchutter’s curious clan of figures, immersed in what feels like a collective purge, is no accident. Indeed, the belief systems they adopt, and the rituals they undertake before us, are the very mirage of perception that faith requires to exist. Believing is thus a disruption of seeing; faith but a bastardised, optional version of reality.

Rendering itself, gasping (2026) continues DeSchutter’s loopy play between perception, observation and belief, but is now presented less as a narrative and more as an ever-evolving abstraction that proffers the anticipation of a totality of experience but does not as it constantly morphs between shape, perspective and even dimension, serving up a simultaneity of possible outcomes. Form reads as a head or a stage; ground pushes in and out, swells and troughs; line models and describes only to slip into flat passages of colour. What should shouldn’t and ‘why’ is not the question but the answer. The chameleonic shift that fizzes across the surface makes it nigh on impossible to ascertain what ‘itself’ is, was or will be. The gasp made is thus an inhalation of energy, torquing stage and sense, but also a (self)-reflexive response to the surprise such re-germination engenders. Nothing is stable in the Quantum universe, as DeSchutter’s painting unveils. The rendering of ‘itself’ harks back to the crisis of Narcissus and, indeed, the many folds of colours evincing drapery that unfurl across the panel would attest to that, as do the numerous blue creases suggesting water. Narcissus’ gaze is one that connects the exteriority of seeing with the interiority of believing; one a liminal act, the other an act of the subconscious. So it is that DeSchutter here affirms that the fabric of reality is impossible to experience as a linear, unparalleled dynamic. Reality – and our efforts to render it – slips between layers of consciousness and observation, serving a plurality of vignettes, actions and reactions that, seen in isolation, deny us the ability to render ourselves in (or as) reality but, when allowed to collide with each other, offer us a miasma of being where ‘nothing’ is fixed, ‘something’ is contingent and yet everything dazzles with life - lived and will live.


VI: FIELDS OF QUESTIONS QUESTIONING QUESTIONS OF FIELDS

I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing anything than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything ...

Richard Feynman, interview on BBC programme ‘Horizon’ called “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” (1981).

Quantum mechanics feeds off ambivalence. It is a realm where reflection, translation, permutation and asymmetry abound and boundaries collapse in on themselves. Other than ‘life and death’, the great existential binary that shapes us is ‘question and answer’ (based on the assumption we know we’re asking the right questions and that there is indeed an answer for it). The Quantum world has lots of questions but very few answers. And that is the nucleus of its raison d’ětre. Binaries deliver in opposition, yet they are formed from the same material; even as they resist each other, they cannot deny their entanglement. DeSchutter’s A field of questions with the same answers (2026) and A field of answers with the same question (2026) are two paintings that function as a diptych yet are not. As surfaces, patterns and images, there is a clear connection between the two – the viewer feels they are looking at the same object, but seen at a different time, in a different space or from a different perspective. The same folding curlicues of drapery, water and flesh all trickle in upon itself, yet our experience of them remains individualised. DeSchutter thus superpositions the question as the answer and the answer as the question, in both binary terms but also in Quantum terms, emphasising the tiny differences between the two as mere ripples in a pool of endless possibilities.

By questioning the matter of the question, these two paintings problematise further our preconceptions about reality, faith and truth. DeSchutter was raised agnostic but then spent part of her early adult life inside the Catholic Church. An experience that shifted the very core of her existence. No longer living that life, or embalmed by its systems of belief, the artist’s paintings continue to beg those big questions about how we are here; when did we get there; where is it and why, that faith so often ‘answers’, but now with the vacillation and incredulity of the Quantum vocabulary at play, offering no answers, just more questions. Those further questions are answers enough though, elevating our planes of experience from ordinary to extraordinary, looping what we observe, determine, experience and assume in particles of ignorance, now waves of understanding, that ebb and flow as possibility. Or hope. The philosopher, Kevin L. Michel claims life is made richer by Quantum theories since layering this ‘cosmic weirdness’ onto the physicality and practicality of our known, earthly terrain, allows us to move through parallel worlds which Michel says become a space for our ‘dreams’. DeSchutter’s unanswered questions thus mirror the unquestioned answers pivotal to faith, both nurturing a dreamscape replete with hope or anticipation, but predicated on nothing. This is the great entanglement of allusion and illusion.


VII: DRESSING THE VOID

I’m writing these words on February 28th, barely two months after the event. At least I think I am. I can’t be sure when, or even if, it actually happened. Or what really took place. Then again: what is truth, if infinitely many truths can exist at the same time? But let me start from the beginning.

Andrzej Wronka, The Last (2025).

The paintings of Jody DeSchutter pursue only what religion or Quantum mechanics seek: truth. They deliver exactly what that science and faith do: questions. Her latest body of paintings eloquently describes the Quantum disruption of our concept of truth. No longer absolute – heads or tails, black or white – truth is now a landscape of probabilities, entangling allusion with illusion, transforming isolated phenomena into deeply connected, almost magical relationships that simultaneously exist here, there, everywhere and nowhere. It is both sin and miracle; question and answer; a mirage of its own concreteness.

Such interconnection is found in DeSchutter’s looping lines, shaping then re-shaping form until it passes the point of no return and heads inexorably towards a void where chaos becomes the ultimate epiphany. Yet within this ‘scape of paradox, oxymoron and reflection lies the possibility of harmony and alliance, noted in the compositional and chromatic equilibrium the artist always manages to salvage from the maelstrom of meanings she engages with. Art’s attempt to arrest the grain or gravity of truth thus fails in simply figurative or abstract terms. If Quantum physics tells us that our reality is sheer flux, then DeSchutter’s confluence of figure and environment – depicted from numerous perspectives – and their superposition perfectly articulates the known (and unknown) struggle for a participatory truth. One entangled between what we see and believe; between what we consciously think and automatically feel; between what is allusion and illusion. This is how DeSchutter dresses the void; her searching line and interrogative brush turning clothes into waves into questions into a new fabric of reality that challenges yet embraces the void’s enigmatic uncertainty and the infinite possibilities it presents for time, space and dimension; for life, faith and art.

You know what came before before? What happens after after.


Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
1-3 July 2026