|
|
| 
JOANNE MATTERA High Street Gallery Please click images above for full view.
My paintings are succulent in color and surface but reductive in image and mark. I practice an esthetic you might describe as lush minimalism: a sensuous surface married to the austerity of the grid. The sensuousness comes courtesy of encaustic--pigmented wax--which has been my primary medium for almost two decades.
Uttar, my current and ongoing series, is inspired by the brilliant palette of miniatures from Mughal India and the small, refulgent paintings of Renaissance Siena. While illumination--as a visual narrative, or metaphorically as a representation of the divine--was at the heart of these extraordinary paintings, I intend no such narrative in my own work. Certainly there is conversation as colors assert and demur, but I am interested in the way hues interact when they abut, slide under, or slip over one another and the way the retina is piqued by this interaction.
As always, the grid is the conceptual underpinning of my painting. Over or around its structure, I work with a simple geometric vocabulary of dot, stripe or block. I begin each new painting with a general palette (typically, saturated colors mitigated by the translucency of the wax) and a specific geometric element. Beyond that, there is no direct plan. My method is to repeat the chosen element--stack it, crowd it, layer it--into a dense but orderly aggregate. I work serially, so each painting both reflects the ones that preceded it and presages the ones that will follow.
There's a lot of visual cross referencing. I often have several paintings in progress at the same time, so you don't need to know the exact chronological order of this series to understand its logic or see its development. Indeed, I often show the newest paintings with earlier ones, because I think of the series less in terms of linear chronology than as an ongoing opus.
The Uttar series began in late 2000. Almost 300 paintings later, the series continues apace. I like to think of my work as a controlled version of the unexpected, but the opposite is equally apt. I've called the series Uttar because I wanted a word that alluded to India, to the miniatures, without being a direct referent; Uttar Pradesh is the name of a province in India in which the Taj Mahal and the holy city of Varanesi are located. Besides it sounds similar to "utter," which has resonant associations for me--as in "to give expression," as in "total and unconditional," which is essentially what I'm feeling about this work.
High Street Gallery
|