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Current Exhibit
Updated: 8.7.2007
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JOANNE MATTERA
About Uttar
My paintings are succulent in color and surface but reductive in image and mark. I practice an esthetic you might describe as lush minimalism. Simplicity of element has informed my painting for most of my career; sumptuousness comes courtesy of encaustic—pigmented beeswax—which has been my medium for over a decade.
Uttar, my current and ongoing series, is inspired by the brilliant palette of miniatures from Mughal India and the small, refulgent paintings of Renaissance Siena. While illumination—as a visual narrative, or metaphorically as a representation of the divine—was at the heart of these extraordinary paintings, I intend no such narrative in my own work. Certainly there is conversation as colors assert and demur, but I am interested in the experience of color—the way hues interact when they abut, slide under, or slip over one another and the way the retina is piqued by this interaction.
I've called the series Uttar because I wanted a word that alluded to India, to the miniatures, without being a direct referent; Uttar Pradesh is the name of a province in India in which the Taj Mahal and the holy city of Varanesi are located. Besides it sounds similar to “utter,” which has resonant associations for me—as in “to give expression;” as in “total and unconditional,” which is essentially what I'm feeling about this work.
As always, the grid is the conceptual underpinning of my painting. Over (or around or despite) its structure, I work with a simple geometric vocabulary of dot, stripe or block. I begin each new painting with a general palette (typically, saturated colors mitigated by the translucency of the wax) and a specific geometric element. Beyond that, there is no direct plan. My method is to repeat the chosen element—stack it, crowd it, layer it—into a dense
but orderly aggregate. I work serially, so each painting both reflects the ones that preceded it and presages the ones that will follow. There's a lot of visual cross referencing—particularly since I often have several paintings in progress at the same time—so you don't need to know the exact chronological order of this series to understand its logic or see its development.
Technically, I do a lot of layering and a fair amount of scraping. The wax allows it, perhaps encourages it. Even when the surface is smooth, it's often the result of previous layers being brought to the surface. More important, it's my way of making a painting that is compelling on its own terms, not simply because the wax itself is so beautiful.
The Uttar series began in late 2000. Almost 300 paintings later, the series continues apace. I like to think of the series as a controlled version of the unexpected, but the opposite—an unexpected version of the controlled—is equally apt.
In a recent essay,* the art historian Flavia Rando correctly identified my approach: “For Mattera, the process of making art is a process of intuition working within a disciplined framework.” Addressing the Uttar series specifically, she called it “the artist's response to the material world…a poetics of materiality and process.”
-- Joanne Mattera, December 2004
Notes
. All of the paintings are on a substrate of braced lauan.
. The paintings are laid onto a wax ground that has been applied to the panel. My ground consists of two layers of clear beeswax applied sequentially to the lauan. I fuse the first layer of wax by melting it by heatgun into the wood; the second layer is lightly fused into the first. I then apply two consecutive layers of pigmented-white beeswax, fusing between applications.
. Once the wax is molten, I apply it (quickly) to the surface, using regular bristle and hair brushes. Fusing takes place after each layer of wax or each group of brushstrokes.
. My substrate, ground and working method produce a painting that is archivally sound.
. At least half of the Uttar paintings are 12 by 12 inches. The works increase in size in diminishing numbers. The largest painting in the series is 48 x 67 inches.
. Additional images can be viewed on my website, www. joannemattera.com
. *Flavia Rando's essay, “Uttar: Poetics of Materiality and Process,” was published in a catalog of my work for a solo show at Simon Gallery, Morristown, N.J., September 10-October 12, 2002.
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McGowan Fine Art
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