The shorthand image of Detroit’s Cass Corridor art scene in the 1970s jibes with the popular image of Detroit—generally tough, gritty, industrial, dilapidated, and dangerous. Gordon Newton’s work exemplified the Detroit aesthetic: rough-hewn and apparently slapdash constructions, cobbled together from the detritus of the Motor City and smeared with greasy black and yellowish-gray grime. Cay Bahnmiller’s paintings and found object collages were similarly grungy, and in photos it’s sometimes hard to tell where Michael Luchs’ rusty, dusty creations stop and the plumbing supply warehouse where they hung (owned by Corridor arts patron James Duffy) starts. Their sonic equivalent was the raucous, rifle-wielding proto-punk band MC5, whose signature anthem “Kick Out the Jams” lent its title to a landmark exhibition on the Corridor artists at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1980. The DIA now owns a few portraits of Corridor artists from that era painted by Detroiter Nancy Mitchnick with an expressionistic directness that makes them of a piece with her contemporaries’ work.

        One of those portraits, from 1973, is of Jim Chatelain-—a young man with angular features, a thoughtful look, and a big head of ‘70s hair disappearing off the edges of the canvas. Chatelain’s work could be abstract or figurative, but it always reflected his urban milieu. His 1972 painting Jim’s Baloney is a web of multicolored, interlocking stripes of sign painter’s enamel applied with a roller. One of his drawings in the Kick Out the Jams show was made using motor oil. His figurative work was even more evocative. On canvases less than two feet square, Chatelain painted small characters, often in pairs, who were sketchy in both senses of the word. Sketched in with expressionist vigor, his characters often accosted or assaulted one another: a man raises his hands while another sticks a gun in his back in one image, and in another, a balding guy smokes a cigar oblivious to the suspicious dude approaching from behind. His figures grapple or confront one another against a grimy, whiteish void that isolates them like bugs under a microscope, so that we witness their struggles with a sense of detachment, even resignation. In the 1990s and into the 2000s, Chatelain zoomed in on his characters to create individual, if unflattering, portraits: heads or busts of battered, weary people, now more detailed and colorful but still bluntly brushed in, and still hovering in empty space. The earlier ones in particular have the air of crude religious icons or background extras from a biblical scene by Nolde, Ensor, or Bosch.

        In Chatelain’s recent show, a 23-year survey at Oakland University in suburban Detroit, the artist seems to zoom in closer still, to peer below the surface of his subjects. He peels back the flesh to reveal the biology pulsing and oozing underneath: meaty cellular blobs, dangling pustules, branching blood vessels and tracheae, and webs of connective tissue. Some of the open wounds appear to be reinforced with rebar, concrete or, as in 2020’s Lakefront, what looks like a sluice or sewer grate, albeit one installed into a surgical incision. One painting (My Little Friend, 2015) features a dissected, green-skinned monster; another depicts a mysterious see-through owl. Random eyeballs appear where they don’t belong. Not all the images here are meant to depict heads, or even living beings; some even appear oddly architectural. Still, Chatelain has described the images as “animated,” and it’s true that the vivid colors and heavy black outlines he employs bring them to throbbing, cartoony life. Many have the same icon-like presence as his older portraits. One 2016 painting in particular with the biblical-sounding title After the Garden Is Gone feels for all the world like an abstract version of the Man of Sorrows, flayed, chained, and bleeding. That may make Chatelain’s works sound grim, but their abstract approach can be strangely funny in an over-the-top way, too—Grey’s Anatomy by way of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. As he told the show’s curator Ryan Standfest in an interview, “it’s a failed painting that doesn’t have a little humor in it.”

        Chatelain says that the show’s title, “Correcting Past Mistakes,” refers to his tendency to return to older paintings and rework them, amend them according to new thinking, or even cut up photos of them and reassemble the pieces, embellishing the result with paint pens. A number of the paintings here are patched with layers of paper, painted to replace whatever was underneath. One collaged image, Nosey from 2023, incorporates a shrunken version of 2015’s Two Heads into the snout of a dog-like creature who perhaps is poking its nose where it doesn’t belong (specifically a colon-like form in one corner of the image). An oil painting from 2015, Gas Mask, depicts a fan-shaped screen of filters behind which protrude hands clasping daggers and swirling clouds of miasma. Where the painting is done in muted grays, greens, and reds, the untitled paint pen/collage version from 2023 is upgraded with brighter color, a more clearly face-like shape, and an arsenal of revolvers bristling from behind the screen. It’s a technique that Chatelain calls “a way to free up the work. To play with it.” He compares his recent collages to his early multilayered roller paintings, saying “they were all about overlapping space… I keep doing a thing on top of a thing on top of a thing.”

        There are other works here in a somewhat different style. These feature large globular forms painted onto plywood with enamel in subtle tones—pale tans and yellows, gray and black and dirty white—and textured with dashed lines. The images are augmented by hundreds of Phillips head screws, in rows and random patterns, as well as holes drilled into the planks. Head On a Plate shows a crude face in profile festooned with hardware. Another is titled Memory Jug—not a bad euphemism for a skull, though this image does include a handle and lid. 2006’s Newton’s Brain, In the Real World, features a cleft-chinned and animal-eared form with a skull-like mask; it’s tempting to wonder if it’s Chatelain’s Cass Corridor comrade Gordon who’s being referenced in the title rather than scientist Isaac. Of the works in “Correcting Past Mistakes,” these pieces most recall the sort of gritty objects that once resided among the pipes and fixtures at the Duffy warehouse back in the day. The past may need to be corrected sometimes, but to paraphrase the MC5, it nevertheless “abounds and resounds and rebounds.”

Sean Bieri, a cartoonist and graphic designer, has written on art for the Detroit Metro Times, Wayne State University, and the Erb Family Foundation among other outlets. He received both his BFA and a BA in Art History—28 years apart—from Wayne State. He is a founding member of Hatch, an arts collective based in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, where he lives. He is currently assisting Hatch in the renovation of the “Hamtramck Disneyland” folk art site.