Kenny Schachter, Art in the age…, 2025. Photography by Cary Whittier. Image courtesy of the artist and Jupiter.
In Kenny Schachter’s show at Jupiter gallery on the Lower East Side, I was struck by a sense memory—a visceral jolt of déjà vu. It was the feeling I had in the basement of my first New York apartment over a decade ago, when I looked up and realized all the piping above my head was covered in aging—and in places crumbling—asbestos insulation. It was as if my body, even before my mind, was telling me: Get out. This isn’t good for you. This will cause you harm.
The surfaces of some paintings in “Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction” recall the texture of drop-ceiling tiles, stucco, and, yes, the wrapped asbestos insulation on boiler room steam pipes in decrepit, not-up-to-code New York basements. I would soon learn, from the press release, that the artist made the works in collaboration with Matr Labs, a company that “develops bespoke robotic hardware to transform digital imagery into richly textured oil paintings” (emphasis my own). But let’s be clear: the uncanny valley of this gag-inducing texture is a bug, not a feature.
Three paragraphs in and I haven’t described what the paintings in this show by the New York-based artworld fixture, self-styled provocateur, and NFT enthusiast are of or about. They are about nothing, mostly. Schachter serves up nothing a few different ways, and under scrutiny, the aesthetic and conceptual void behind the work only expands—a feat that is almost impressive.
Kenny Schachter, “Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction” (Installation View), 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and Jupiter Contemporary.
There are three banal, washy monochromes on icky surfaces, Painting after painting (after painting) 1-3, and three glitchy vertical stripe paintings, Dress for comfort (glitch)1-3, all 2025. (The trained critic in me wants to help you see them by describing them as a triangulation of Gerhard Richter’s squeegee paintings, Wade Guyton’s inkjet canvases, and Xylor Jane’s mathematically composed works, but it would be a disservice to each of these artists to conjure a squint-eyed resemblance.) There are navel-gazing word paintings with phrases including “The Other Kenny” and “Person of the Internet.” (Kenny Schachter himself is a favorite subject.) The most vapid painting in the room might be the centerpiece, Art in the age…, 2025, a robot-produced picture of an imagined hardback book with the same title as the exhibition. It’s a nod to Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935, but it’s as if in trying to download the German philosopher-critic’s gravitas, Schachter can’t find the right dongle. The reference doesn’t compute and lands with the intellectual force of a pun.
The painted book cover also features a robot generically stylized from 1950s-era science fiction. This retro-futurist motif appears in four sculptures: Robo Dealer (seated), 2025, a silver, turquoise-faced human-sized action-figure (with hatched scruff around a saccharine crimson smile) in painted fiberglass, seated on a vintage chair, and three oversized square blocks, in cast aluminum, that Schachter calls Robo Cubes, all 2024. They are enlarged versions of a toy developmentally appropriate for a drooling, crawling baby. Upping the scale and glossiness of the surface doesn’t upgrade this.
Kenny Schachter, Robo Dealer (seated), 2025. Photography by Cary Whittier. Image courtesy of the artist and Jupiter.
Schachter could develop his own notion of “robotic” production, after Benjamin, by saying something new about artmaking in our current era of 3-D scanning and printing, AI-generated imagery, and outsourced fabrication. Instead, if Schachter is adept at anything here, it is in his ability to string together the keywords du jour, bringing attention to his activities—which loosely pertain to these topics—across various media. This results in landfill-destined artworks.
I wouldn’t be writing any of this if it weren’t for the paintings in the back room. Here, in what feels like a separate, if not wholly unrelated show, is a better one. It includes five ethereal, wavy paintings titled Kenny can’t paint (robot version), 2024, and Kenny can’t paint 1-4, all 2025. The first is credited as “robotically rendered to oil on canvas,” while the other four are described simply as “spray paint on canvas.” Despite the title, maybe Schachter tried to paint, and a bit of his responsive, non-robotic decision-making seeps through, giving the series a scarce touch of humanity. It’s a passable selection of objects, not worthy of a review, but not worthy of scorn either (like the objects in the front of the gallery).
This is small praise for works that seem to answer a question no one is asking: What if Christopher Wool issued editioned work in collaboration with Urban Outfitters? There’s a carpet work, of Himalayan wool, linen, and silk, also titled Kenny can’t paint, 2024, displaying its titular phrase, beside a metal piece on the floor, Bridget Riley Gate Relief, 2024, which may or may not be a stencil used for making the wavy patterns on the surrounding paintings.
Kenny Schachter, Kenny can’t paint 1, 2025. Photography by Cary Whittier. Image courtesy of the artist and Jupiter.
This art, in the back room, is better. But it is not good. The work throughout Schachter’s show got me thinking about augmented reality, the technology that uses a smartphone’s camera or VR goggles to reveal virtual elements intermixed with a live feed of the space around you. When I opened up my camera roll later, even the paintings in the front room were subtly transformed to more closely resemble passable gallery fare. The problem, for the paintings, is that we live in the real world, which is not always mediated by our phones.
The show fails in such a spectacular way that it is almost worth seeing, in part to marvel at all the decisions that various people had to make in order for it to be greenlit. As I turned to put away my camera and looked at the paintings one final time, I caught myself holding my breath, as if to prevent myself from inhaling their air, as if afraid of taking in the off-gassing of the artworks’ noxious auras. As I left, I thought: I love it when a good show is extended. Why not have a bad show close early?
John Vincler
Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction: New Works by Kenny Schachter
March 13–April 26, 2025
Jupiter
55 Delancey Street New York, NY 10002
(786) 238-7299
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 11 am – 6 pm
www.jupiterarms.com