Charles Matton (and here)
Not easy to take in from just jpegs on the internet, so here’s some key info: These are miniature spaces, not more than a few feet in any direction. Matton is apparently more known in Europe, not as much here. Not at all midwestern, just wanted to post it. Maureen Mullarkey’s a fan. More images after the jump.
these are really appealing.
it’s funny, this past week/weekend, UNCG hosted visiting artist Eve Ascheim. a bunch of us took her to lunch and she was talking about various artist- friends and how different the notion of painting is to each of them. we were talking about expression and energy in the process and she quoted Mark Greenwold as having said something like the following:
“Yeah, you know, there I am with my double-zero brush just whaling away on the painting…giving it hell…”
for obvious reasons, the image this brings to mind is (for lack of a better word) insanely cute. and i wouldn’t say that this work is even remotely cute, but i like it a lot, i think for similar reasons.
i love matton’s work and have a couple catalogs. i’ve seen several in person. there’s an eerie, quiet stillness in them, and a kind of vertiginous effect that’s actually more powerful than simply recognizing it can describe – like the magician’s suitcase revealing a world.
The jpegs are good and all, but I’m irked I haven’t seen one in person.
Magician’s suitcase, yes! I am so glad to learn about this artist. The light is incredible… My first thought was about the Dutch dollhouses at the Rijksmuseum (also featured in a good novel, In the Image, by Dara Horn). Though I think I might be remembering them as more complex spaces than they really are. I love how Matton’s pieces are a little room/home/world of their own; this reminds me of Dutch interior paintings or paintings like the central panel in the Merode altarpiece that sort of construct a little room-box for the figures to inhabit. The childlike appeal of the miniature in these also makes me think of this quote: “Paul Klee builds himself a little house of art in a realm somewhere between childhood’s innocence and everyone’s prospect of infinity…” (Duncan Phillips)
I took a few undergrads to Kansas city over the weekend to visit the studios of some artists in town. One thing that struck me is how much the artists are involved with, and the students appreciative of, slow methodical, almost tinker-y work. There seems to be the same idea of skill and the role of process in Matton’s work. It’s not quite meditative/minimal. But I think it shares an appeal to ego-less-ness with a lot of minimalist, process based work.
Choberka’s work, that big flag painting Sam posted, struck me as having a similar quality.
I’m soliciting some opinions. Can skill be meaning? Is there a contemporary idea of skill that differs from the idea of skill we’ve seen over the last 50 years? or…Is it just a hang-up; all these generations of de-skilled conceptually-based artists ran out of ideas so they obviously go back to the most obvious idea of what an artist does?
Well, to that I’d say that making GOOD conceptual art does require skill…but I think you’re talking about skill that non-artists can easily perceive.
It seems like a re-arrangement of the same game pieces. There is a dimension of performance in that stance…like New Sincerity Minimalism.
I’m just building from what you wrote, but it seems to me that one of the main appeals of Juxtapoz-style low-brow art is that it requires an amount of lay-friendly skill.
yeah, i think ‘lay friendly’ is a big part of the skill i’m talking about…
thoughtfulness and consideration are absolutely necessary for good work (regardless of how a work looks in final form or how that final form seems to telegraph – or not telegraph – the skill of the artist). thoughtfulness and consideration are correlates to technical application.
skills seem to be something more like a base set of tools – almost at the level of senses themselves. they serve expression, communication, ideas – the physical, psychological and emotional phenomena of experience. this makes skill into a pretty awesome and interesting arena of intent. a place to hone and work and aspire.
i don’t know… it seems like a given that non-artists favor verisimilitude and virtuosity. but that doesn’t automatically make these qualities wrong or bourgeois or anachronistic or banal. here’s to a broader definition of what “skill” might be – one that doesn’t reject older notions of what skill is while continuing to investigate what might constitute thoughtful and considerate making.
I think that’s a very nuanced all-purpose definition of skill and how it’s important to see skill as multi-faceted. With these artists I’m talking about, as well as with Charles Matton, there seems to be an idea that it’s possibly enlightening or redemptive to spend time in kinds of making that are careful, attentive, methodical, repetitive. Specifically, non-flashy, non-heady, non-virtuoso sorts of skill. I think that these specific artists might say their work is banal, but in a good way. Chuck Close addresses this topic when he talks about the relationship between the way he paints and ‘women’s work’ like knitting and sewing, but it’s a little different here. I don’t see the gendered aspect in Matton’s work.
I believe that skill can be meaning, but is not necessarily so. It is fair comment that obsessive craft is in some cases merely a pendulum-swing back away from de-skilling orthodoxy, or perhaps a substitute for genuine inspiration in some cases.
To argue for the opposite, however, an artist I want to throw into the mix here is Michael C. McMillen. He has an installation here at Weber State University at the moment that carefully constructs alternate realities out of the familiar. This current work is monumental in scale, but previous works have involved even more stunning miniaturizations than Matton, often utilizing optics to create transmutations of the familiar into something revelatory.
The peep-hole works in particular transcend the craft/skill question I think.
Here are some links:
http://www.lalouver.com/html/mcmillen_bio.html
http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles2003/Articles1103/MMcMillenA.html
http://www.scu.edu/desaisset/exhibits/mcmillen.htm