Artists

Marc Matchak

Press release

Over the past few years the paintings have begun before painting, or at least before the authority of painting announces itself. A method emerged less as a technique than as a way of lowering the temperature of intention: loose canvas thread soaked in watercolor, fixed behind raw canvas, then sanded from the front until the dye bleeds faintly through the gesso. What arrives is not an image but a compromised surface, a stained hesitation. The canvas is no longer blank enough to sustain the fantasy of mastery. Something has already happened to it. The work begins from that prior condition. These submerged marks remain throughout the exhibition like psychological weather — not exactly visible, though continually structuring visibility. They permit a looseness that matters because the paintings are not interested in resolution. They proceed by drift, by attachment, by pressures that never fully declare themselves as content. The forms hover between figuration and ornament, landscape and garment, body and residue. If there is a consistency across the works it is not stylistic so much as temperamental. Painting here operates less through signature than through discrepancies in handling, density, and address. Some surfaces are thin and atmospheric, others compressed and nearly decorative; some paintings appear to gather themselves around a latent figure while others disperse into pattern and sediment. Recognition is delayed. The exhibition asks to be appraised spatially and phenomenologically rather than consumed image by image. The paintings accrue meaning relationally, across intervals, repetitions, and removals. The figures that intermittently surface do so in a strangely indirect way. They are built less from anatomy than from garments. Coats, veils, robes, turbans, the body arrives already overdetermined by what conceals it. Underneath there could be almost nothing, stick figures even, armatures carrying cloth. The face, too, becomes unavailable: wrapped, obscured, dissolved into color and contour. What emerges is not portraiture but a kind of social apparition, identity produced through coverings that both announce and withhold the subject. Clothing becomes a structure for opacity. The downstairs paintings remain more anchored in process and allusion. Several still bear the material residue of the string method beneath their surfaces, as though the image were being held in place by an earlier, submerged event. References enter obliquely. One painting circles the figure of Isabelle Eberhardt, explorer, convert, wanderer, someone whose passage through gender and religious identity already unsettles the coherence of selfhood. But the reference has largely drifted free from biography by the time it reaches the canvas. It persists atmospherically rather than narratively, as a tonal condition. Le chantier des gosses takes its title from Jean Harlez’s film about children witnessing the demolition of their neighborhood, the disappearance of marginal spaces, the futility of resistance, the transformation of lived terrain into administered space. Yet the title functions less as explanation than as detached annotation, another attachment whose origin has already loosened. The painting does not depict the film; it carries something of its afterimage: improvisation under pressure, play beside ruin, ornament arising against conditions of loss. Upstairs, the smaller paintings feel released from some of the gravitational pull of reference. They are lighter, stranger, less committed to any stable subject-position. Forms flicker toward faces or emblems only to recede again into decorative incident. If the lower level proposes grounding, the upper level suspends it. The movement between floors becomes part of the exhibition’s syntax: embeddedness giving way to drift, attachment giving way to dispersal. The title, With Attachments, names this condition precisely because it refuses to stabilize what the attachments are. Material attachments, certainly thread, stain, backing, support. But also psychic and associative ones: references that persist after their origins have blurred, desires that organize form without becoming legible as symbols, garments that construct bodies while obscuring them. The paintings never quite sever themselves from these conditions, yet neither do they explain them. They remain attached without becoming reducible to what they are attached to. - Antonia Lia Orsi