Exhibition
Matt Bahen: The Curve of the Earth
22 Oct 2015 – 23 Dec 2015
Address
- 513 West 26th Street
- New York
New York - 10001
- United States
Matt Bahen creates paintings that are grounded in a sensibility that challenges the current demand for a frenetic pace. In The Curve of the Earth, the viewer is confronted with a series of large dark blue nocturnal paintings.
About
These night skies, illuminated by shooting stars and the aurora borealis, reflect silhouettes of dark mysterious structures in the landscape. A traditional representation of the sublime, the night sky connotes a backdrop for our stories. In Bahen’s hands, the dark monuments behave as modernist sculptures, lionizing formalist qualities and rejecting conventional narrative.
From a distance, Bahen’s paintings appear almost photographic in clarity yet as one draws near, the image disintegrates into a series of sculptural marks. The works themselves have an intrinsic dichotomy of surface and image; the thick and rough handling of the paint reinforces the brute nature of the subject and the conceptual agenda of the work. Through heavy paint and pronounced brushwork, these paintings possess an analogue presence of the artists’ hand; they accomplish a distinct separation from the photograph, which is conflated with the idea of journalistic truth.
