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The genre is
besieged from within, if you will, because serious practitioners of abstract
_expression past and present, who counteract its apparent facility with rigor
and clarity--Malevich, Kelly, Newman, Stella--are accused, and sometimes
rightly so, for tipping the formula in the direction of theoretical credibility
at the expense of humanity.
This is where Matarazzo’s courage and talents are most apparent. If you do
this work seriously--as Matarazzo surely does--and, whether consciously or
unconsciously, work from a belief in the Worringer-ian notion that abstract
means--line, rhythm, color, tone, overlay-- can be some utopian, direct,
authentic mode of unmediated communication able to side-step language,
narrative, biography, the banality of specificity yet speak in a human
way--then your work has this whole besieged anti-history of abstract
_expression riding on its poor back. And it must be the more compel-ling to
be taken the slightest bit seriously.
If, like Matarazzo, you feel that a yellow surface--layered, deftly worked,
nuanced by intuition, a gift for color, and filled with calligraphic
marks--can hold a world, that such a surface can tell a tale in a manner that
mirrors the open-ended, half remembered/half invented mechanisms of memory,
then you take on this beleaguered legacy with courage. And at your own peril.
Matarazzo is more than up to the task. She takes on the baggage of abstract
_expression and wins. So comfortable and adept is this artist with the
workings of abstract _expression, so well does she manage to make a style
that has been thoroughly mined fresh again, that her approach goes well
beyond courage into a kind of confident, believable exuberance.
She is confident enough, in fact, to paint to great effect with eccentric
egg-yolk yellows, whites that are muted as the sun on sand, opulent harem
reds that in less skillful hands could (and do sometimes here) descend into
decoration.
Matarazzo trained her hand with the unruly medium of chalk pastel, and in
previous shows she has made it clear that she possesses the technical control
and self-discipline to never let abstraction reduce to mushy marks or sappy
sentiment. Though the artist says she works from instinct, there are years
and years of art school lurking, checking each decision, solving each color
dissonance and concordance, wedding means to emotive ends in a way that is
just plain impressive.
Large and small scale works include painted surfaces, collaged elements, and
passages of pastel and pencil calligraphy. Bits of old canvases are
resuscitated as accents, leafs of rice paper enliven the surface and even
threaten to peel away, sketchbooks collected over the years have been cut up
and added. Snippets from Matarazzo’s Tunisian notebooks of the ‘70s, in which
she studied daily to write Arabic, as well graph paper are imbedded, peeking
in and out of washy fields to pit the idea of a grid, of a fixed system of
signs, against the free play of the mind.
This show is called Stories, implying that the works are recollections
of experiences, records of sights, sounds, and actual life events. These Stories
recall the artist's travels during the ‘60s, ‘70s and later in life
throughout the Middle East, to places like Morocco, Iran, Jordan and India.
She does not tell you the Conde Nast version of an exotic place and how it
came to life for her as she learned to love a people and learned to see
anew--how corny would that be? Matarazzo instead allows a field of calibrated
beiges to be an opportunity for our gradual discovery of all the rich hues
within it, thus recreating for us her experience in the desert as she first
found the place--odd, plain, drab--only to locate a rich emotional and visual
world there. In this way she keeps to Kandinsky’s dictum that art should
create the experience or emotion within artist and viewer, rather than
represent via mimesis the copy of the thing that makes us feel.
In the way most salient memories defy linear recollection--and are often
linked via weird emotional circuitry to a feeling, an aural, sensual,
olfactory trace rather than a clear anecdotal tale—Matarazzo’s abstract
canvases strike us as dim reminisces over which we layer our own. In a series
of small canvases called Shahreza the sky and light of a place by that
name comes to life. A dense blue seems built from azures, ceruleans, cobalts
layered level on level, texture upon texture. I have never had the pleasure
of seeing a North African sky, but in these blues I was tossed back to a long
forgotten memory--perfect and pristine as I may ever have--of laying on my
back looking up at the crisp Santa Barbara sky making shapes from clouds with
my toddlers.
Most of the works on paper are untitled, which helps her stories become ours.
And this is precisely how memory works. The small to huge scaled collage,
pastel and paint works are joyful; small orbits of color become a tiny
signature exploding from work to work to promulgate the sheer energy of
creation. In Untitled Stories #24 these swirls of color stand in for
markets where vendors lay out gorgeous skullcaps, one after another, for sale
in the desert sun. There are a couple of passages in very large works where
disciplined intuition falls into eye candy, but mostly you are alternatively
charmed and keenly aware that gut guesses here are metered considerations by
a sophisticated art maker. The artist also says that she cannot help but
realize her looking back at the Middle East occurs at a time when such
bridges are sorely needed.
Whether your remembered universe is architectonic (No Street Names),
or ripe and sensual as an expatriate’s sunset during the tripped out ‘70s (When
the Day Lilies Close), Matarazzo has a knack for allowing us each our own
view of sheltering skies.
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