Joanne Mattera, Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta - New Paintings

Joanne Mattera: New Paintings
Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
March 5 – April 17, 2004

In her second solo show at the Marcia Wood Gallery, New York artist Joanne Mattera offers the newest paintings from her Uttar series. Inspired by the brilliant palette of illuminated manuscripts and Persian miniatures, Joanne Mattera works in a vein that is succulent in hue while reductive in image. She describes her work as “lush minimalism.” Indeed, it is the color—luminous, dense and optically invigorating—that charges an orderly geometric field.

Key to the color is her medium: encaustic—pigmented wax—which has a refulgence and materiality like no other paint. The reductive component is assembled via a simple vocabulary of blocks or stripes. “I begin each new painting with a selected palette, typically saturated colors mitigated by the translucency of the wax, and a specific geometric element. Beyond that, there is no direct plan,” says Joanne Mattera. Her method is to repeat the chosen element, to stack it, crowd it, layer it into a dense aggregate, often scraping into the surface of the wax to release colors previously laid down.

The Uttar series, begun in late 2000, consists of some 240 paintings that range from 12 by 12 inches to over 48 by 48 inches. As with serial work, each painting provides both a capitulation of its predecessors as well as a suggestion of the ones to come. “There’s a lot of visual cross referencing,” Joanne Mattera acknowledges. Followers of her work will recognize familiar elements, such as the three-by-five-block grid and the packed columns or rows of stripes. At the same time, anyone new to her work will find much to discover, for each new painting, with its particular combination of color and geometry, offers a unique visual experience as well as a conceptual entry into the series.

The midsize paintings in this exhibition, while revisiting some of Joanne Mattera’s familiar themes, offer yet a new one: a broad horizontal stack shot vertically with translucent swipes of color. The cross-layered image references both the rigor of the grid as well as the richness of a textile. Joanne Mattera states, “These new paintings are a little more lush, a little less minimal.”

Joanne Mattera is a nationally acknowledged master of encaustic, and her book, The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax (Watson-Guptill, 2001), has become the standard reference on the subject.

MARCIA WOOD GALLERY
263 Walker Street, Atlanta, GA 30313
www.marciawoodgallery.com