Suzanne Unrein
Undertow
Dan Cameron

Suzanne Unrein’s paintings project a utopian vision of an imaginary world in which all species co-exist in synchronous harmony.  It is a virtual paradise where all sensate forms of creatures have come together to share their brief moment in the sun. Against a patchwork of dazzling skies, Unrein’s brush traces broad, fluid outlines to describe multiple overlapping and adjacent species, surrounded by tumultuous seas and lush, verdant landscapes. Unrein’s paintings contain echoes of Rubens’ visions of the Garden of Eden before the fall, yet in her version, paradise has undergone some mysterious revisions. 

The human figures in Unrein’s paintings are mostly female or androgynous, and some sport non-human heads, lending an extra frisson to works like The Sea King and The Parade, which teeter on the edge of a no-holds-barred interspecies orgy. No one needs clothes, tools, or shelter since animals are full partners with us in the cycle of life. 

In so doing, Unrein’s broader purpose seems to be an effort to super-charge humans’ identification with other species by way of a nearly pagan ideal of how we benefit when we intermingle and share our intimate lives. She isn’t instructing us to go out and re-enact the activities depicted in her paintings, but rather, like her, to develop and maintain an intuitive sense of what it would feel like to step outside of our own skins and into the awareness of other living creatures.

With their boisterous and dynamic rendering of human and animal behaviors, Unrein’s paintings are contemporary reminders of what has faded into a distant collective memory.  It is a full commitment to exploring what Eden might mean in an ideal world.  They are clearly intended for those of us who are hyper-aware that we are living in an age of accelerating environmental decline. To endow her landscape with such supernatural powers requires a particular variety of faith at this juncture of human history, when a global reckoning is beginning to occur with respect to the Anthropocene, and our species’ recognition of our moral and metaphysical failure in attempting to force nature to bend to our wishes.

Unrein’s optimism is the possibility that there will be a last-ditch worldwide effort to employ the full potential of human imagination to confront our own dilemma. The danger is that either nature will respond to our recklessness by somehow casting us out as unfit to be future inhabitants of earth, or that human greed will somehow trigger a catastrophic global event that dooms both the planet and ourselves. Whether it is, in fact, too late to save the earth isn’t really a provable point one way or the other, whereas the shared sense of purpose by which we might confront an unstable future has never been more critical. By evoking an all-but-lost paradise that somehow, inexplicably, might still be within our grasp, the paintings prod us, Unrein’s fellow inhabitants of the Eden we may never see again, to accept our shared responsibility to ensure that the oceans, lakes, rivers, plants, and animals that have been left to our care do not perish as a result of our recklessness.

An apt starting point for this position is the 2021 painting, Lost in the Harbor, whose composition shows what might be three related scenes, or the same scene shown at different points in time. With sinuous strokes, Unrein loosely captures six or seven human forms, none clothed, all in various stages of response to a boat-related predicament, which is possibly related to the presence of a lioness and wild boar on board the large craft in the center, precariously extending their heads over the bow. Despite the potential for chaos, the scene is one of pure visual harmony, with the body language of the multiple figures engaged in physical exertion rendered as if in an accidental state of grace.

Aside from forebears such as Rubens and Breughel, a thoughtful search for the historical antecedents of Unrein’s painterly quest might begin in the US, with the indelible series of pictures based on the theme of Peaceable Kingdom made by the Quaker minister and painter Edward Hicks (1780-1849) to visualize the prophecy from the book of Isiah (11:6): “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” While all humans depicted in the sixty-two extant versions of Hicks’ painting are fully clothed and face the viewer in mannered poses, the uncanny sense of harmony between humans, other alpha predators like lions and tigers, and animals typically considered the latter’s prey has fascinated viewers about this theme since Hicks’ first painted it in the early 1830s.  Unrein’s works share with these paintings the desire for harmony within nature, yet in her contemporary version, the animals maintain their innate animalism.  Their instinctual responses and potential for violence while rarely acted upon, are nonetheless simmering throughout.  

In terms of modern and contemporary painters whose influence can be detected within Unrein’s palette, choice of subject matter and technique, the first reference is to Picasso, Matisse, Soutine, and Dufy, who each invented a unique treatment of the pastoral landscape with figures. In the 1950s, New York painters like Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning, whose style began as pure Abstract Expressionism and then gradually verged into figuration, demonstrated through example that such a transition was not a mere turning back the pages of art history. More recently, contemporaries of Unrein’s, including Cecily Brown, Judith Linhares, and Dana Schutz, have invented their own hybrid variations of figurative expressionism, in which animals also sometimes play a co-starring role. For these painters, the act of condensing an entire world view into a single picture happens by way of an act of profound identification with the subject at hand, and faith in painting’s ability to express the nearly inexpressible.

Discussing her work, Unrein pinpoints a pivotal moment in 2015, after she watched a TV documentary about Kevin Richardson, a South African man who runs a sanctuary for lions and leopards rescued from captive-breeding or cub-petting facilities, or otherwise harmed by their contact with people. On an impulse, Unrein got on a plane to Africa to meet Richardson and have the direct experience of benign contact with big cats, a turning point that was followed two years later by a trip to Bali and Borneo, where her experience of interspecies mingling was shaped by direct contact with monkeys and street dogs, who continue to play a prominent role in her paintings. Since then, her quest has been to articulate through imagery a psychological state of transformation, where the figures are in midst of experiencing a state of oneness with nature, much as any of us would expect to occur if we suddenly woke up in paradise.

A recurrent theme in our collective accounting of our species is that we connect with some essential part of ourselves when we are in a state of extended fraternity with other sentient life forms. In the painting What Lies Ahead, Unrein positions a single boat at the center of the composition, along with an interspecies entanglement of limbs, torsos, haunches and heads, each individual body doing its part to prepare for a group embarkation (or disembarkation). Employing a smoldering palette of fuchsia and sap green set against a marine blue background, Unrein’s whorls of motion describe the group activity with just enough details, to inform us that there’s something intimate, mysterious, and ritualistic present. We can’t exactly pinpoint their activity, but even without the specifics, Unrein is able to trigger within our imaginations an updated version of the paradise that Paul Gauguin channeled through his renditions of Tahiti.  That it isn’t real, only adds to her achievement, since despite our suspension of belief, Unrein has given us a body of paintings that most of us would probably give anything to live inside of.