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Unlocking the Chairs from the Grid: On Certain Paintings of Gloria Matuszewski There is not a kind of front and back to Gloria Matuszewski’s paintings. There is a middle that you can only get to by an entrance curiously always the same portal, that of a stillness in space inviting contemplation. Her work is always psychological, though she might call it “prayerful.” But the works comprehend violence in their own way and are consequently too reactive and volatile to be strict prayers. This applies not just to the Chair series of paintings, but also to the Grids. The Chair series manifests psychological power in the strong “itness” or “thingness” of the chair. The poet Rilke, who has influenced Gloria and made an appearance in earlier work (the “Roses” group of paintings) and obliquely in the Chair paintings, wrote at an early age that “to find images for my own transformations …. it is important to realise that […] intellectual structures may function precisely as images(1) .” First, the Roses, functioned in this way, then the Chairs, but throughout these excursions, always the Grids. They are code for the psyche. The artist’s paintings can be said to be psychological, speaking to transformations, because they emerge out of that familiar ether of personal experience, “life,” and yet are not simply described in their life on the canvas by their life functionality as chair or rose. This is what gives the Chair group of paintings the distinguished feel of historical relevance and huge emotional poise, as with the NYC Chair, for example. It is a chair teaming with, in the velvet fabric, faces on undulating heads, like those you might have seen at the World Trade Towers on 9/11. This psychological effect is also apparent in the quality of suffering that is evoked by “Two Chairs” with its theatrical “duo” of chairs on the “stage” and the ghostly architectural feature materializing in the blood-red color field. We are arrested in face of these Chairs’ huge impact in a mysterious space, the wreck of life that looms in the taut discipline of their form. The Grids also bring us to an arrest, a kind of violent psychological halt before the convictions of the grids’ squares, their distinctive individuality which nevertheless bows collectively to color, to the hues and shape governing the total frame. The theater of the Chair images telescopes in reverse the theater of the Grid images: the quotidien chair in huge psychological relief reversing precisely to the emboldened square in composed psychological stillness. Here in the Grid series is a more consistent kind of prayerfulness. There is a purity in these paintings that arises out of space cleared of emotional and psychological debris and of all physical artifact: anger, tenderness, ashtrays, tables and, certainly, all of the chairs. N. M. Hoffman (1) Anthony Stephens. Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Hölderlin, Rilke. Jacket 32, April 2007. |
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