Solo Exhibition at
Marcia Wood Gallery, Diamond Life, April 16 - May 28,
2011, installation
images
Joanne Mattera returns
with her fourth solo exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery and her
twenty-sixth career solo exhibition. Mattera will present a new
series of work that she terms chromatic geometries. The series
title, "Diamond Life" refers to the geometric shapes
of some of the actual paintings, the diamond pattern on others
and the diamond like quality achieved when light hits the diagonal
grain of the surface, causing color to become deep and luminous.
A breakthrough moment in the summer of 2010 was the genesis of
Joanne Mattera's new series of paintings and works on paper entitled "Diamond
Life". The artist has identified geometric order, along with
color, as the two main concerns that have engaged her throughout
her practice. Repeated pattern elements within a grid define the
structure of the composition within which layers of saturated color
are applied to create optical depth and surface tactility. Mattera
has called her work "lush minimalism" in a tongue and
cheek reference to the dichotomy of the two terms and the happy
co-existence of both concepts in her work. As one writer observes " “Minimalist
artists used the grid to downplay the sensuality of color and brushstrokes.
The austerity helped focus the viewer’s attention on pigment
as pigment, line as line—a primary concern of 60’s
minimalism. Joanne Mattera has a different agenda. She uses grids
the way classical poets used rigorous rhyme schemes: to impose
elegant order onto an otherwise messy outpouring of emotion.” --
Staff review, The Week (New York City), 2003.
In the new work the grid has been turned on it's point to reassert
itself as a diamond shape and marks a turning point in the artist's
practice. As one of six artists to participate in the publication
of "Pull", a portfolio published by Marcia Wood Gallery
in June 2010, Mattera created the print "Soie". Based
on an ongoing series of paintings of layers of translucent encaustic
called "Silk Road", the print image is a square of glowing
emerald green, created by printing two identical square plates
at opposite angles - thus alternating the vertical and horizontal
layers of brush strokes to create a subtle grid, like a weave,
or piece of silk. At the moment of deciding whether to orient the
square image on the paper vertically or horizontally, the studio
director, studying the right angle positioning, reached out and
made a slight turn with his hand, and looked at Mattera with raised
eyebrows. The print was placed on the paper as a diamond and upon
return to her studio the artist created a series of diamond-shaped
grids in gouache on paper, then went on to create a series of small
square paintings in encaustic on panel that are positioned on the
wall in the same 45-degree orientation. Mattera states that she
thinks of the Diamond Life paintings as chromatic geometries rather
than color fields. As ever, whether gouache on paper or encaustic
on panel, Mattera's works are luminous meditations on geometry,
light and color with a sensual tangibility.
Joanne Mattera earned a BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts
College of Art, Boston, and an MA in Visual Arts from Goddard College,
Plainfield, Vermont. She has been painting for 30 years, exhibiting
regularly throughout the United States. She is the author of The
Art of Encaustic Painting; Contemporary Expression in an Ancient
Medium, which has become the standard reference on the subject.
Her work is in the collections of The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair,
NJ, Connecticut College, Print Collection, New London, CT, University
Libraries Collection, State University of New York at Albany, U.S.
Embassies, Slovenia and Poland, and the Consulate of Brunei, among
others. Her extensive bibliography includes approximately one-hundred
books, periodicals, catalogs, essays and online reviews.
For more information about this artist, please visit www.joannemattera.com |
|
