Joanne Mattera Statement

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Updated: 2.20.2009

JOANNE MATTERA

About Uttar and Joss

My paintings are succulent in color and surface but reductive in image. I think of what I do as "lush minimalism." As always, the grid is the conceptual underpinning of my work. In the encaustic paintings from my Uttar series, the grid is the painting: organizing principle, vehicle and image. I'm interested in the ways hues interact when nearly transparent vertical swipes of color pass over a ground of horizontal bands.

In an essay early in the Uttar series, the New York art historian Flavia Rando 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."

Recently, in her essay "Geometry Reloaded," the New York critic Lilly Wei, responded to a work in the series with this comment: "This is a voluptuous painting, its grid about to melt down, it seems, into pure irresistible paint." More recently still, the Philadelphia critic Roberta Fallon offered this observation: "Mattera…is an artist who delights in the process. With a palette influenced by Indian miniature painting and with a love of non-narrative, non-objective expression, Mattera delivers a world of beauty and order in which individual [elements]-with their spontaneous expressions of color, texture, drip, drop and slather-are valued."

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 Varanasi 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.

With Joss, the intent is the same, but the medium is different: gouache on paper. Joss is the name of a Chinese domestic god. The word is a Portuguese derivation of deus (Latin for "god", pronounced something like jeuss). I chose the name because I like the sound; moreover I like that the word for divinity, like the concept of divinity itself, transcends cultures and religions and yet shares similar roots.

-- Joanne Mattera, 2009

Notes . Flavia Rando's essay, "Uttar: Poetics of Materiality and Process," was published in a catalog on the occasion of a solo show at Simon Gallery, Morristown, New Jersey, in 2002 . Lilly Wei's essay, "Geometry Reloaded," appeared in the March/April 2005 issue of NYArts magazine . Roberta Fallon's essay, "Beauty, Order and Individuality," was published in a catalog for the exhibition, "Order(ed)," curated by Julie Karabenick, at Gallery Siano, Philadelphia, in 2005