Awash in Color: My Own

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If you happen to be in San Francisco, stop in at Adler &Co. Gallery , 77 Geary Street, to see this installation. The work is from my Silk Road series, each 12 x 12 inches, encaustic on panel.

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A Mixed Review

I am delighted that my small show at OK Harris has gotten some critical attention. Last week, Maureen Mullarkey's generous review appeared in The New York Sun. This week there is a review in Abstract Art on Line, an ambitious web project by Joseph Walentini, himself a painter. It's a mixed review, but Walentini said some very nice things, which I have excerpted below.

My buddy Richard Frumess offered this observation on the two reviews: "They're coming from two different directions: the Abstract Art Online review looks at the individual paintings through the whole show, the New York Sun review looks at the whole show through the individual paintings."

If you have a moment, go on line for Walentini's entire review, which contains thoughtful comments, and if you can, spend some time there. Not only am I in good company this issue--with Gregory Amenoff, Myron Stout (a huge fave of mine) and Michael Shemchuck (whose strong show is in another gallery at OK Harris)--Walentini's project is good reading. More than that, it's a wonderful example of how artists can expand their lives outside the studio.

From Abstract Art Online, May 15, 2007:

Joanne Mattera

OK Harris Gallery, 383 West Broadway, to May 26 At OK Harris: Silk Road 54, 2006, encaustic on panel, 12 x 12 inches

Over the years Joan[ne] Mattera has gradually reduced the imagery in her work to finally arrive at this celebration of color, surface and also the medium she has championed: encaustic painting. Mattera combines conceptual order, as embodied in the structure of the grid, with beauty. The grid is represented both explicitly and implicitly. With the former it is in the even distribution of the 1 foot by 1 foot square paintings along the wall. WIth the latter, the grid is subtly woven into the paint handling and the medium......Continue: http://www.abartonline.com/html/ny_views_16_7.html

A Good Review

"Silk Road," my show at OK Harris Works of Art in New York City (up through May 26), got a thoughtful and good review by Maureen Mullarkey in the May 3 "Arts and Letters" section of The New York Sun.

Installation wall of Silk Road paintings at OK Harris

I've copied the text into this blog entry and formatted it to include the paintings she mentions. If you would prefer, you can read the original on line at http://www.nysun.com/article/53750?page_no=2 . (There are no images in the on line review, but there's a good one in the print version.)

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JOANNE MATTERA: Silk Road
OK Harris Works of Art

"The ancient, labor-intensive process of encaustic painting has come a long way since art historian H.W. Janson, in 1941, declared it an "almost forgotten medium." If Jasper Johns put it back on the map in the 1950s and '60s, Joanne Mattera has been a prime mover in making the technique accessible to a new generation of painters. Her 2001 handbook, "The Art of Encaustic Painting," is the reigning manual for contemporary artists drawn to the surface qualities and translucence for which the medium is known.

The medium itself is very much the subject of "Silk Road," Ms. Mattera's series of small encaustic panels on view at OK Harris. Each panel is a simple expanse of what appears, at quick glance, to be a single color. But owing to the opalescent properties of pigmented beeswax applied in layers, these radiant fields are irreducible to monochrome. Cunning visual subtleties are the raison d'être of the series.

Silk Road 87" (2007) appears superficially as red. But the panel cools, through a preternaturally delicate scumble, to a nimbus of pale blue that rises upward from the bottom edge like polar rays on the horizon. The red undergoes shifts in intensity from layer to layer (10 of them).

Silk Road 87, top, and Silk Road 90, each 2007, 12 x 12"

Silk Road 90" (2007) spreads a luminous green-yellow over clear vermilion that asserts itself between the interstices of the brush strokes that crisscross right to left and top to bottom. Each panel achieves the woven quality of a textile, the warp and woof of exquisitely controlled brushwork.

If no panel is truly monochrome, neither is any color totally opaque. Light is held in the depths of the wax; color is suspended within the body of the medium. You look into the panels, not simply at them. Unseen underlayers display themselves naked at the edges in counterpoint with the dominant color.

The refinement of Ms. Mattera's touch is all the more impressive when weighed against the handling properties of encaustic, which work against finesse. Encaustic begins to cool — and harden — the instant a brush leaves the heated palette. Speed of application is critical. Ms. Mattera's panels are no larger than 12 inches square because that is as far as a single, discriminating brush stroke can be sustained on an unwarmed panel.

Resonance from within lends depth to understated surface patterns. Viewed in ensemble, there is nothing minimal about them.

--Maureen Mullarkey
Until May 26 (383 West Broadway, between Broome and Spring streets, 212-431-3600.)

On the Road

The Silk Road of history was that fabled 5,000-mile trade route between China and the Mediterranean.

My own "Silk Road" is a new series of small and midsize paintings in which I'm focused on color and the enduring power of the grid. Up close, each apparently monochrome painting is a quiet grid, built up by differently hued layers of intentionally grainy color applied at successive right angles. I've limned each panel to heighten the intensity of its color field. The title of this series was suggested by the iridescence and texture of woven cloth; the materiality comes courtesy of my medium: encaustic (pigmented wax). The paintings are installed for exhibition in variable-size grids or in a zip along the wall, for the repetition of shape, changed by color and surface, reinforces the elements of each individual work and reflects my involvement with grid-based abstraction.

"Silk Road 43," 12 x 12", 2006

Installation wall in my studio, each work 12 x 12"

If you're in New York between now and July 21, please visit the Elizabeth Harris Gallery where five of my "Silk Road" paintings are included in Neoplastic Redux, organized by Miles Manning. Other artists in the show include Gene Davis, Pat Lipsky and Helen Miranda Wilson.

Here’s an installation shot. Thornton Willis is in the foreground; I'm on the wall in the rear. Photo courtesy of the Elizabeth Harris Gallery.

If you're cyber traveling, spin on over to the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta. Here's an installation view of my recent show there. You can see more at the website if you click onto the "Exhibitions" page, then scroll down to "Past Exhibitions" and "2006".

Pure Color, my solo exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery, April 20-May 27, 2006. From left: "Silk Road" grid, each work 12 x 12"; "Stack," 48 x 67"; "Bask," 48 x 50"; all encaustic on panel

I'll be blogging from the Silk Road for a while, so check back soon. I should be posting a couple of times a week. If you want to know more about me or my work: www.joannemattera.com