Pictures and Jugs
April 13th, 2009“It’s his second solo show in New York, but his first solo show as a New York artist,” noted Jeffrey Deitch as he led a toast in honor of Matt Greene. JD helped Matt move from L.A. to NYC, where Matt now has a studio in Williamsburg. I got to meet Matt last summer, when we were both in The Left Hand of Darkness, a group show at The Project curated by Sarvia Jasso and Yasmine Dubois.
Opening night
Massive paintings on canvas and maple panel fill the main gallery at Deitch’s Grand Street space. We see apparitions of phantom women in dresses and heels, or mouth-watering bouquets of mushrooms, presumably of the genus Psylocybe. Friends and I looked closely: most seemed to be mixed media collage combinations of large scale photocopy, acrylic, oil, and varnish or resin. Matt probably has a tried-and-true system, though the variegated surfaces make the handicraft elusive. The glistening resin surface is suggestive more than functional. In different hands, it would “seal” the heterogeneous surfaces, it instead bubbles and drips at random, leaving too many untouched areas to actually be protective. Though Matt used this technique in Surrender, his previous show at Deitch in 2006, it is still a refreshing alternative to the skillful and demanding planes that seductively enclose work by Fred Tomaselli or Julie Mehretu. It’s cool, and I imagine a studio full of big jugs – jugs of polymer, PVA, and “Matt” medium – and an overworked mop.
Yipes, Stripes! Sue de Beer (with fur coat) and Matt Greene (right)
An neat arrangement of drawings in ink and acrylic depict ranks and files of Victoria’s Secret models who occasionally dogpile into a morass of stray body parts. The drawings dismember the bodies by selecting choice bits and cropping out others, and feel more seedy and sweaty than the starched, suburban donnas of elder ladies man John Wesley, an untouchable titan whose insurmountability nevertheless should not discourage imitation. And between both the drawings and paintings, we might think of Bellmer’s segmented bodies, not to mention Bellmer’s process of constructing, rather than hiring, a female body to be his model for a photograph.
Which would you rather take home?
Artist Matthew Ronay, one of my favorite sculptors, and a fierce drummer, is an exception, a hired (or at least borrowed) model who dazzles the camera in a dress, wig, and terrifying mask that makes Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s “Heidi” look like Miss Hawaii. “Who else would have arms that hairy?” quipped artist Jesse Bransford. Bransford’s ex, video vamp Sue De Beer, looked on, opped up in a striped dress. (She looks great, and I wonder if she uses the same Creme de la Mer that inspired one of the sculptures in Rear Projection, the new show by John Waters, Sue De Beer’s gallery mate at Marianne Boesky.)
