The DIY power of dark thoughts painted brightly

VISUAL ARTS: Tourette's PaintingsDana Schutz. (And, in Gallery 2, works by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein.) Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Until September 15

Dana Schutz's Tourette's Paintingsat the Douglas Hyde Gallery look pretty cheerful, but they're also quite dark in mood. They're brightly coloured with a lot of pattern and comic-book drawing, but more often than not there's something disturbing or unsettling going on in the frame. In Poke, an anodyne- looking man is being poked in the eye, as if in slow motion. Shaking, Cooking, Peeingis like a tetchy riposte to television cookery programmes that project images of personal and domestic perfection. It looks as if the vegetables aren't the only things getting the chop.

Cartoonish violence is part of Schutz's stock in trade. For one series of paintings, exhibited under the title Self-Eaters and the People Who Love Them, she imagined a group of individuals who literally consume themselves. There's a metaphor there somewhere, presumably one about self-harm and other forms of self-destructive behaviour, but she depicted the self-eaters in graphically literal terms, spelling out the practicalities in almost pedantic detail. That tendency to verge on the pedantic runs through all of her work, but it's not a flaw, not least because she makes a virtue of it.

Her underlying presumption seems to be that if she can think it then she can depict it, rather as a child does. Hence the unlikely trio of actions coinciding in Shaking, Cooking, Peeingand in Swimming, Smoking, Crying. The latter is both funny and genuinely sad: a huge head lies half-submerged in the water, cigarette between its lips, tears falling as a diminutive arm arcs across to complete a stroke. She called these her Tourette's Paintings because the ideas were involuntary: the images just popped into her mind.

She was born in 1976 and grew up in suburban Detroit. Her mother was an art teacher, but it wasn’t until she was in her mid-teens that Schutz began to paint, although, she has said that once she did begin she was serious about it from the start. She’s based in New York now, having gone there to complete an MFA at Columbia. She has been exceptionally successful, and her work is included in many public collections internationally.

One of her first series of exhibited paintings was about an invented character, Frank, who happens to be the last man on earth; another series imagines someone who has a phobia about gravity. It’s as if many of her pictures are a means of visualising thought experiments. In interviews, however, she downplays the conceptual dimension that the term “thought experiments” might suggest. Rather than being a conceptual painter, she’s a painter who is drawn to odd concepts.

She rules her strange fictional worlds like a capricious deity, controlling, mutilating and doing away with her creations with what one critic termed “blithe cruelty”. Which is to say no more than that, like numerous artists, writers and creatives generally, she has a ruthless streak and a certain toughness of attitude. The bright colours and bold patterns don’t disguise it: if anything they accentuate it. The bottom line is that the work comes first.

In the late 1960s the American painter Philip Guston turned away from abstraction and began to paint deliberately awkward, cartoon-like pictures, helping to mobilise the huge resurgence of figurative painting in the latter half of the 1970s. It’s hard not to see him as a vital precursor of Schutz, though the luxuriance of her palette and her whimsical narrative inventiveness certainly set her apart. She’s also been linked to the symbolist painters of the later 19th and early 20th century, including Gauguin, and she uses wide-ranging art historical references.

It annoys her to be described as an outsider or folk artist, as she has been, because she clearly isn’t. Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, some of whose work is showing in the Hyde’s Gallery 2 was. The Douglas Hyde always programmes its two linked galleries very carefully, so that you can be sure there will be a dialogue between what’s going on in each.

There is a DIY aspect to Schutz’s bizarre narrative conjectures, and during his life Von Bruenchenhein took a DIY attitude to art and theoretical science. He was born in Milwaukee in 1910, and died there in 1983, rarely travelled, and really lived within his own imaginative world. His stepmother, who dabbled in evolutionary theory, seems to have encouraged his independent approach to knowledge and hierarchies, and he described himself as a “Freelance Artist, Poet and Sculptor, Innovator [sic], Arrow maker and Plant man, Bone artifacts constructor, Photographer and Architect, Philosopher”. He worked for a local bakery for about 16 years but otherwise devoted all his time to painting, making sculptures from chicken bones, ceramics, photographs and theoretical writings. He married, in the early 1940s, Eveline “Marie” Kale, and she became his muse and model.

The Douglas Hyde is showing just one of about a thousand paintings he made, an obsessively detailed, imaginary, apocalyptic landscape, as well as a number of the photographs he made of “Marie”. They are variations of conventional pin-up photographs in which the various fantasy costumes and settings are obvious but nonetheless charming improvisations staged in their Milwaukee home. There’s a curious, admirable innocence to both Von Brunchenhein and “Marie”, and one hopes that they were happy and fulfilled in their world within a world.