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"Let us recognize the fact once and for all…," wrote Piet
Mondrian in 1920. "If you follow nature, you will not be able
to vanquish the tragic in your art." The great neoplasticist
saw the processes of nature—the erosions of the landscape and
the human body—as inherently melancholy and exorcised them
from his work. Multimedia artist Matthew Picton, now showing
at Mark Woolley, finds a similar pathos in nature but chooses
not to eschew decay but to embrace it, record it and dandy it
up like a debutante for the halogens and hardwoods. "Dressing
demise," he calls it. In so doing—in ever more virtuosic
variations on his under-droning mantra—he has proven himself
one of the most brilliant conceptual artists working in
America today.
In his three Portland appearances since 2000 and in recent
one-man shows in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the
increasingly well-known artist has conjured inexhaustible ways
to evolve his obsession with time and terrain. He digitally
photographs weather-worn streets and sidewalks, takes plaster
castings of cracked lakebeds, then turns these raw materials
into organic fantasias that bridge the chasm between nature
and artifice.
In 2002, Picton affixed 16,000 glass beads to an enormous
honeycomb structure, then, like some mad pastry chef, drizzled
the whole affair with multicolored cake sprinkles and moss
from the forests near his home. Smaller honeycombs spilled
onto the floor and climbed up the water pipes, as if
possessed. In 2003, Picton plunged a syringe of adrenaline
into Core Sample, using Slinkies to suspend a network of
glittery prisms from the ceiling of the old Margo Jacobsen
gallery. Light danced, metal glinted and words failed, except
these: tour de force.
The current show is less rampant with geodesic critters,
more formal and focused. It has the ozonic whiff of minimalism
about it, and the ring of an etude on the drawn, raised and
embedded line.
Picton's drawings follow the contours of cracked pavement.
In their black-on-white and red-on-white simplicity, they
meticulously re-create the byproducts of tires, heels, sun and
ice on asphalt, and yet in their austere presentation they
become, according to the artist, "more than just a scientific
object; wresting something from its natural environment and
putting it into a gallery setting forces you to make an
imaginative shift between the origin of the thing and the work
of art that came from it."
In the raised drawings, Picton traces branching arteries of
pavement cracks onto DuraLar, cuts them out, covers them in
black, red or lilac-colored enamel paint, then pins them a few
inches off the wall, creating intricate shadow play and
imbuing the one-dimensional line with a 3-D presence.
Finally, the embedded paintings trace their genesis to the
hot late summers of Southern Oregon, where the artist haunts
back roads and "foul-smelling lakebeds, covered with rotting
vegetation" in search of promising topography. After settling
on a site, he pounds rubber into the cracks, taking an
impression of the surface and substrata, then spirits the
casting back to his studio. Over the course of several days he
adds layer upon layer of color, resulting finally in pristine
squares of blood orange, amber, Nehi grape, cobalt, and a
pugnacious yellow jostling its way toward the fluorescent.
Beneath the squares' smooth exteriors float the fissures and
nubs of the surfaces from which they were ripped, their inner
valleys and moguls aglow with a silver sheen reflected off
mirrors mounted behind each piece.
Picton has grounded ethereality in dirt and asphalt via
art's ancient alchemy: rock into pigment into paint into
Pissarro, copper and tin into bronze into Brancusi. Along with
the varied Oregon landscapes his work so ingeniously mines,
this artist stands among his adopted home state's most
precious natural resources.
Originally published on
WEDNESDAY, 2/9/2005
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