Look, See

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Joanne Mattera's Silk Road can be seen at Adler & Co. in San Francisco, where I have viewed it three times. It consists of nine 12 x 12 inch panels, each a different color. The surfaces are creamy with a dull sheen, the colors are softly brilliant, and each panel holds an image made with smoothly-finished cross-woven paint set off by a line of another color peeking out around the edges of each panel. They are beautiful, for sure, but what they are doesn't end there.

That these paintings are encaustic, made with wax is a prominent and significant aspect of this work. When I think of encaustic I think of two characteristics: something that has body— is an object— but is luminescent, and a process that involves heat, speed and layers. I think of these two characteristics literally, but also historically, culturally, and psychologically.

Wax is a thick substance but is translucent— one thinks of candles— and it is crystalline and heavy but eases friction— consider wax on surfboards and skis. Wax is durable and protects what is covers or encases. We wax our cars and furniture. A candle is always and forever usable as long as the wick is good. Egyptian Fayum portraits are fresh and vibrant after 2,000 years. Wax can be used to seal jars and bottles. Leaves may feel waxy, and our ears produce wax for protection. Beeswax supports and nourishes colonies in the thousands, and when we think of wax of course we often think of bees, which convert the sugar in honey into wax which is excreted from the abdomen. Encaustic looks and feels so different than oil paint because, aside from the pigments, these two mediums are actually competely different substances. The oil in oil paint has vegetable origins (linseed, walnut, safflower), and much of what we think of as wax is paraffin, which is a petroleum product, a purified substance that results from the production of gasoline, kersosene, and lubricating oil.

Wax is milky but not clouded. It can be colored, but never quite opaque. Light goes in and comes back out as color. In the depth of wax light is held and it glows. But it isn't clear light; it's frosted, subdued, quiet. The wax is thick, and it might be in layers. In the glowing light of wax's body seeing is slowed down. We see the surface and we also see into the wax. On the surface we might see texture—brush strokes, scrapes, marks, lumps, pits, etc.— and then our sight goes beyond and below the surface. There is an actual depth that our vision goes and sees into, and our vision can stay there. We see light and color as a suspended substance, like looking into an ice cube or a crystal. The act of looking into something is an instance, like when we see our breath on a cold day, or when we look into slowly moving water. The colored wax is a body that holds the light— it is a physical colored thing into which environmental light enters and glows— and it is also paint, a flat colored medium the function of which is to depict light— for example, two different colors next to each other can have the physical and the illusory effect of space, brightness, and contrast. (Right: Joanne Mattera: Silk Road, 2005, encaustic on panel, 12 x 12 inches each)

To paint in encaustic means to engage in labor. It requires melting and mixing, and preparation is both physically hot and time consuming for the artist. However, when the encaustic is ready the actual act of painting must be conducted quickly. We see speed in the paint's application and the resulting gestures recorded in the paint. Recognizing this, we enter into a recognition of pacing in the paintings; we see evidence of different speeds. There is the knowledge of a slow preparation, there is also the actual speed of the execution, and there is the slowness of our looking into glowing color. We see how the execution is actually a frozen moment or, rather, the cold state of something done quickly, having been executed in the (pun alert) heat of the moment. This somewhat contradictory state—of contrasting slowness and speed—is something to which the qualities of encaustic seem particularly suited.

I think Mattera intimately knows encaustic as both a material to use and as a natural component of her subject. This gives her work integrity—she has the skill to make a physically refined art work, and she has found the balance between knowing how to put the material at her service conceptually and recognizing how the qualities of the materials can better help define her conceptual stance. She recognizes encaustic’s pace and light and body, and she allows the medium to be its best by using it directly and by staying out its way, but having said this I certainly don’t mean that she does this passively by simply letting colored wax do what it will do. She has to employ general construction techniques like controlling buildup and exercising finesse with surface. And of course as a painter she also has to do the usual painterly things like pay attention to scale (for example, the relationship between brushstroke and paint density to image and each panel's size), orchestrate color, and work the edges, both the edges of the panels and the edges where different areas of paint meet. I would think that for a painter using encaustic it would be tempting to try to make or let the wax do too much, to let the encaustic take over as something beautiful, dense, and physical. But what I see in Mattera's imagery is that it is reduced to a point where the material becomes an active ingredient in her work’s meaning, but the imagery is also still complex enough to be about much more than wonderful effects of encaustic; they are paintings.

Wax makes light physical, and the medium of encaustic makes light both physical and pictorial. Light is a major preoccupation throughout western painting's history. One can go backwards from Rothko to Seurat and the Impressionists to someone like Gerome to… well, what road would you like to take? Fragonard to Chardin to de La Tour and so on? Or from Goya to to Rubens to El Greco to whoever? Eventually you’ll get to Durer and Van Eyck and Holbein and Van der Weyden. Pick your own names— you can easily make your own list which leads towards hard, polished, glazed, luminous, painted surfaces of physical light, and depicted scenes of light and shadow. Light is prominent in other arts: think of hard, shiny Limoges Email peints; think of the glazes on Islamic tiles and Chinese Sancai figures; think of stained glass. And think of Dan Flavin, or Robert Irwin, or James Turrell, and the importance of the actual phenomenological experience of light and perception. Light is a major preoccupation because light is how we see, and various qualities of light have different moods, evoke different times and places, and create drama. Mattera's use of encaustic and color for light places her in this historical lineage.

Another historical connection I see is a use of color and an organization of space that not only brings to mind the intensities of Klee and Seurat, but also go back to Indian miniatures and Medieval illuminated manuscripts. Klee, of course, used the grid and playful color, and Seurat combined intense color in structured ways to create form and atmosphere. Mattera does both of these things, with the added bonus of encaustic's tendency towards atmospheric effect. Indian miniatures also often use intense color, a finely rendered surface, and brush strokes which, even at the micro level, are integral to the image—these qualities are also found in Mattera's work. Finally, illuminated manuscripts (examples here) often use bands of intense primary color to divide areas of an image; a manuscript page will boldly present a single image, or will divide an area up into sections, each with it's own but related subject, and these images often typically have a narrative quality. I think Mattera shares these qualities, as evidenced by her own compositional impulses, and through the presence of paint that as a recorded act; looking at a painting one sees a story unfold. And in fact a painting like Uttar 135 can be seen as pages laid out in a grid on a table, each page part of a larger whole.

The stripe, the dot, the stroke, and the field are a way to make light and color a clear subject. The phenomena of our visual world can be broken down into these kinds of marks just as easily as shapes can be defined as circle, square, and triangle, and forms can be categorized as cube, cylinder, sphere, and pyramid. These basic marking components lend themselves to stacking, gridding, layering, weaving, circling, linking, netting, dripping, blotting, covering, and accumulation. A reduction of painted line, shape, and form into the basic marking components of stripe, dot, stroke, and field leaves pigmented wax to be handled broadly and naturally, allowing the encaustic to retain its properties of light and color. (Left: Uttar 267, 2004. Encaustic on panel, 36 x 36")

Mattera's paintings are covered, from edge to edge. But unlike many other painters seemingly working in similar terrain who don't seem to recognize that a painting is not a small slice of eternal space and time, Mattera knows that a painting is a unique object, a defined space and time with a specific size and limits. Her paint does not run off the edge into a suggested continuum beyond the painting's surface. She knows that the edge of a painting—where it ends and where the wall begins— is crucial terrain. How shapes and marks are arranged on a flat surface, and how they interact and how their edges meet, and what kinds of relationships those shapes have to the boundaries of the painting, are what makes a painting dynamic, contained, and holistic. How that is handled—we're talking about compostion here—is the difference between a functioning painting that is worth looking and experiencing and just another colored slab hanging on a wall. She gets it. See, for example, Ruby Road (Uttar 270); the way she strokes the paint from side to side and lets the paint drip gives each panel, and the three panels together, a completeness. Another good example is Uttar 237. And it is this completeness—achieved through paint handling and shape placement, and which makes the painting function as a self-contained body—which visually and conceptually makes the painting retain its color and light qualities as part of an essential to this unified whole.

The light and color in Joanne Mattera’s paintings is about the present and the just passing present. Seeing light and color in the material is about the absolute present moment because it’s physical, because this is an interaction with the environment and with current lighting conditions, and because we see it now, in this instance. But if her art has what some might call a contemplative dimension it’s because while the light is a real thing that draws us in, it’s the way this light is lingeringly held in the wax, and the way we look below the surface and into the depth of this light-filled wax, that our looking is slowed down just a beat to an even more present presence, a moment that is slow enough for us to see passing. If our looking stayed on the surface our attention might glance off and finish. If our looking goes beyond a surface, even if a only a fraction of an inch into a physical depth and a depicted depth, our seeing is more settled. The physical effect is slower looking. The psychological effect is awareness of self in relation to the phenomenological world, and that happens in front of the painting. Our seeing becomes the light and the color, and when this happens we live the color and forms of the paintings.

In order to be clear about what I think is the value of Mattera's encaustic work, let me say this: artists often state that one of the functions of their work is to make the viewer more aware of how they see the world, or to help the viewer see the world in a new way. Artist's say this so much that it's a laughable cliche. What happens when your art has made me see the world in a new way? Is the art disposable, with a shelf life dependent on how soon I can use it to see anew? One can easily find art that allgegedly has this goal, and usually that art fails. Frankly, I don't see this as a signifcant function of Western, painted, abstract art. I see this kind of art as having functions and experiences specific to no other media. I want a painting that is well-conceived conceptually, visually dynamic, skillfully executed, that looks and feels thought and felt and integrated. I want my visual experience in the painting, I want to see the painter's decisions, and I want all the parts to work together. I want to stay with the painting, and I'm willing to give a lot to it as long as it is giving back to me. I think Joanne Mattera's paintings add up, and I think they're worth looking at.

Additional info: Joanne Mattera: Ten Years of Encaustic Painting was published on the occasion of her solo show at Winfisky Gallery, Salem State College, Salem, Mass., March 21 – April 13, 2006. The catalogue is 8.5 x 8.5 inches, and contains 16 pages, fifteen color images, a statement by Joanne, an interview with Julie Karabenick, a selected critical overview and biography, and a short essay by Flavia Rando. Joanne will also be showing at Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, April 20 - May 27, 2006.

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