It fills us. We arrange it reveals the extent to which an artist can transcend and subvert expectations. Rob Matthews’s new graphite drawings strengthen the connections between spirituality, personal history, human folly, and landscape that he established in earlier work. Matthews roots his explorations of faith and religion (not the same thing), their miraculous persistence or tenuous limits, in his daily life, whether in an altarpiece titled The Assumption at Ridglea (2004-05) or an emotionally-charged set of drawings in which Matthews and his wife Tracy are visited by demons. While thematically and stylistically related, the new tree drawings resist seriality and narrative cohesion. This contrasts with the explicit programmatic strategies of Kindred, a group of lovingly rendered tondo portraits (2008) and the drawing suite Knoxville Girl in which gradual storytelling and a cinematic sense of sequential frames proved integral to meaning (2007).
In It fills us… these qualities are quietly sublimated beneath imagery that seethes, barely concealing uncanny echoes of dramatic events. The drawings embody aftermath and its implications. Despite the emphatic and crisp delineation of detail their resounding absences are as critical to their impact. Each include haunting, enigmatic evidence – spent beer cans, a curling snake, a pile of salt, a spontaneous memorial, and impaled bats. These curious intrusions alone do not deploy the dis-ease of Matthews’s otherwise pastoral landscapes. The light carries them beyond ordinary observation into a realm of delirium. The subtle suggestion of a sinister haze that pervades these scenes has its parallel in films that present the real coexisting with the unimaginable. Robert Burks, cinematographer for many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films mastered this balance, making black and white menacing, often staging the terrifying in broad daylight undermining the archetype of threatening night. Matthews’s new drawings have these qualities. They subsume the supernatural and bear an unshakable feeling that they conceal secrets that could seep out if we probed the right places.
The second new body of work, ink and cut paper pieces on black ground, may seem anomalous, jarring in relationship to Matthews’s more “precise” graphite drawings. Yet Matthews’s graphite drawings exist through facture, a delicate and surprisingly rough network of tiny strokes and flecks of the pencil – energetic lines that pile up and huddle, never smoothly blended as shadow and illusionistic substance. Although direct and fluidly made, the ink drawings seem to slow this internal pace down. Each object rests still, mason jars respect gravity, cans and bottles understand their edges and limits. The heraldic images -- an anchor, covered bridge, American eagle, fruit arrangement and liberty bell – derive from mason jars. They provoke the greatest leap of faith for Matthews’s audience. They do not, on the surface, employ a realist method to make sense of the world. They seem emphatically two-dimensional, even arrogant in their denial of illusionistic space. The patches of white that define the images modulate, streak, blister, and congeal. Their lack of uniformity may distract or seem slipshod. Yet these are representations that cling close to their sources, each tentative unpretentious line delineated as Matthews found it – the painterly grounds of white appear in places to emulate textured glass.
The mason jar images are deceptively straightforward but evoke symbols. The eagle and liberty bell stand out in a culture that has witnessed fiery debates about the use, meaning and control of images. This work extends Matthews’s interest in the ability (or inability) of individuals to apprehend the symbolic when it reveals itself in the world. That the mason jar was invented by a native Philadelphian plays no less a role in Matthews’s gravitation towards them. A transplanted Southerner, Matthews has embraced his adopted city and to some speaks authoritatively about its arts community. Like the uniformly formatted portraits of friends and family that comprised Kindred these works seem to build towards a collective portrait. As in-progress works they evince the struggles and rewards of the studio, something Matthews has documented online. But on view in an exhibition they are a serious declaration of transition, risk, and a willingness to search. They trace a journey away from what his audience, and perhaps he, considers a comfort zone, crossing a line between public and private. Public display makes them vulnerable, a challenge to us and him, and hold the artist accountable for following through on their direction. They are brave, do not resolve themselves easily, and reveal that their maker shares these qualities.
Robert Cozzolino
Curator of Modern Art
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts