Why I’m not an art writer
My take on Matthew Greene’s show at Peres Projects: “Very Good”
Brian Sholis’ take on ArtForum.com:
In his solo debut, Matthew Greene outlines the contours of a world devoid of hierarchy and false dichotomies, populated by an idiosyncratic amalgam of mushrooms and redwoods, guitars and Marshall amps, and armies of louche figures (often hermaphrodites) based on 1970s-era pornographic magazines. His landscape paintings, as large as twelve by ten feet, and black ink drawings, as small as seven inches square, are sensoriums skeptical of an Enlightenment conception of logic, developing instead by the nonlinear momentum of highly adaptable plants and animals. Regression is not inimical to progress, as it can reverse erroneous steps already taken, and Greene’s paintings often look far back into history; 19th century Symbolism is only a way station (albeit an important one) for an artist whose sources stretch all the way to Stonehenge. How to see that far back and encompass such vast swaths of knowledge? Perhaps by use of a psychedelic gaze, alluded to by blushes of pink, green, blue, and orange peeking through his wide washes of black, and accessible via the heavy music referenced by his titles and the hallucinogenic fungi depicted. It takes a visionary’s confidence to scrutinize, through painting, big subjects like gender, sexuality, how we come to possess knowledge, and how we measure time, yet in each work Greene does so convincingly. As the space of his paintings recedes before us, it is awfully tempting to try and step across the divide.
What the ???? inimical!?!?!?!
Put the Thesaurus down……now.
