Heat of the Moment
For years I’ve described my painting as lush minimalism. Occasionally I think about coming up with another description, just to keep the signifier as current as the work, but nothing resonates as well as those two little words. The thesaurus is no help. “Succulent reduction” sounds like a sauce de cuisine; “drunk negligibility,” like grounds for arrest. And “voluptuous insignificance” just reeks of a bad Internet translation. Geometric abstraction is a good umbrella term for what I do, but it lacks the specificity to describe my particular version of it, which is a sensuous surface married to the austerity of the grid.
In the studio |
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"Despite the complex formal —Jerry Cullum, Art in America, March 2000 |
The Paintings
Fortunately, my visual explorations have yielded more satisfying results than the thesaurus. Tilling a formalist field, I’ve produced four series over the past six years.
Uttar 298, 24” x 24”, 2006
Uttar, inspired by the brilliant palette of Indian miniatures and the small paintings of Renaissance Siena, continues apace motivated by some force within me that keeps finding new reasons to combine blocks and stacks of color. There are almost 300 paintings in this series — the most recent of them newly posted on this website. You might think, “How much can you do with those simple geometric elements?” It’s no longer a matter of the broad gesture — if it ever was at all — but of the variations, painting to painting, within the series. Working serially lets me explore the subtleties of an idea. Inevitably there are changes along the way. I’m not totally in control; things happen in the heat of the moment.
(I’ve called the series Uttar because I wanted a word that referred to India, to the miniatures, without evoking a specific association of an object or place. “Siena,” would have bee too evocative of color or place; “Madras,” “Bombay,” or “Calcutta,” would have had city-specific associations I did not intend.)
Vicolo 25, 18” x 18”, 2006
I like how Uttar, while retaining its own identity, has shown me the way to two other ongoing series: Vicolo and Silk Road. Italian for “narrow passage,” Vicolo exists for its skived and riven layers. Much of each painting is hidden in layers, and only the act of dragging a metal tool across its surface exposes some of what is beneath. Sometimes I float new color into the channels I have created, and I may then scrape those back. I’ve often referred to my work as a controlled version of the unexpected, and nowhere is that more true than here, for despite my concentration and planning, the painting reveals itself as I work.
Silk Road 82, 18” x 18”, 2006
Silk Road, my newest body of work, is the most reductive series I’ve ever done. Each painting is a luminous monochrome achieved by applying layers of translucent paint at right angles. Actually it’s not quite the monochrome it appears. Each painting has about 20 layers and five or six different hues. Working in encaustic, pigmented wax, I apply the paint when it is molten. I could mix colors on a hot palette — the Teflon griddle that holds my paints — and sometimes I do; but mostly the color mixing takes place in your eye as the layers of color, sometimes as disparate as yellow and purple, coalesce into one hue. While you’re up close, you’ll see that the subtlest of grids is formed by the trail of brushmarks and intentionally grainy elements within the paint. The suggestion of iridescence and fabric came after the first few paintings were done. The series just named itself. What else to call it but Silk Road? I’ve limned each painting to charge the intensity of its color field and intensify the square shape of each painting. The paintings are typically installed in a grid.
Mudra 20, 24” x 24”, 2003
In Mudra, the grid exists solely as a point of departure, for the surface of each is a mass of drips and dots that have accreted layer upon layer. Despite the visual abundance of these paintings, I think of them as minimal—or at least minimally conceived — because I have repeated one element, the drop, over and over. The title gets its name from the graceful hand gestures in yoga. While painting I found myself holding my fingers and hand in positions that felt like mudras. This series ended in 2005 at number 30, but I continue to show it.
The Medium
In referring to my work and process as ”Heat of the Moment,” it would be disingenuous to suggest that it’s just about the fleeting moments of creative ecstasy in the studio. It’s also about the way I work. I paint primarily in encaustic, and encaustic requires elevated temperatures — hotplates to melt the wax, a heatgun to fuse the layers of paint once they are laid down. Painting in encaustic permits but a tiny window of opportunity to get a paint-laden brush from the heat source to the surface of the painting before the wax cools and the brush gets stuck. I didn’t choose encaustic because I wanted to make an already difficult calling even more difficult by adopting a process-intensive medium with unyielding parameters. I was drawn by the materiality of the paint and by its luminosity.
These qualities would seem to run counter to my grid-based reductivism, but in fact they create a lush minimalism in which, for me, opposites amplify one another. "Mattera orders the sensuality of the artist's touch with the austerity of the grid," says critic Flavia Rando in her essay, Uttar: Poetics of Materiality and Process.
If this sounds rather Zen, well I suppose it is, for it is the push/pull of opposites — the tension between austere and sumptuous, between controlled and free — that challenges me. There is a Zen to the handling of encaustic as well. Painting in this notoriously difficult medium requires a pinpoint of concentration, a moment in which all action is brought to bear on the act of making one brushstroke, one mark. This is true of painting in any medium, of course, but because wax passes from a molten to a hardened state in just seconds, that moment is specific and evanescent. It is an instant of clarity. The technique is known as encaustic — from the Greek enkaustikos, to heat or to burn — because each layer of brushstrokes must be fused with the layer beneath it. I use a heat gun on the topmost layer until it becomes slightly plastic. At that point it unites with the entire body of wax thus far laid down.
The Studio
The first digital panorama, below, shows you my U-shaped work area, with paints and brushes on the left, and paint tins and hot plates on the right. The brushes don't need to be cleaned; heat reactivates the wax paint. The same is true for the wax paint in each of the small containers. Standing in the center area, I place small paintings on the table and work flat. For large drip paintings, I set up an easel next to the hotplates — or sometimes I just prop the panels against the worktable. Ruby Road (Uttar 270) is on the wall in front of where I stand. Against that same wall you can also see unprimed panels, as well as a couple of square panels that have been primed with pigmented white beeswax which functions as my "gesso."
Joanne Mattera Studio, November 2004
With your back to the wall above, you see the other side of my studio. The worktable and exhaust hood are at left. Recently completed paintings are before you. At right are the pizza boxes that I pad with bubble wrap and glassine to hold the 12 by 12 inch paintings; the slipcases made from corrugated cardboard, similarly padded, will hold the larger pieces. This is another digital panorama, so the studio appears larger than it is.
Joanne Mattera Studio, September 2006
Working with a concise vocabulary of visual elements, I approach each series with an intuitive sense of where I want to go and how I want to get there. I "know" when the work is right, I "know" when a series is finished. I "know" when I need to keep the scale small or to let it go large. I can't tell you more than that, so I invite you to consider these comments and then let the work speak for itself.
The Paintings
The paintings in this Website are in two sections: Recent Paintings and Large-scale Paintings. The division is partly for the sake of clarity, because on a computer screen, without a referent to scale, everything tends to look more or less the same size. Most of the work in both sections was executed within the past four or five years.
