Chrisina Forrer's Weavings

Randall Mattheis June 8, 2021

The Society for Contemporary Art's summer gallery walk is quicky becoming a favorite event of the season. Christina Forrer's masterful weavings images at Corbett vs Dempsey gallery brought a magical reality to a hot urban Chicago afternoon.

Seeming mythical stories of village spirits bring mythical figures present elevating daily life. I love the bold white spotted orange and yellow dress of a woman holding her head in purple arms. Multicolored life spirit spirals upward from cut neck, in the style of primitive Mayan sacrificial rites. A purple head floats above a vibrating green meadow. Spirit figures are stacked along the side.

Death and rebirth are present in this moment where we struggle to once again bring vitality to our lived post pandemic lives.

Kirchner’s painting from mountains above Davos

The essential quality of the weaving reminds me of Anni Albers experiments with color on the loom. The bright colors remind me of the magic infused mountain scenes of Kirchner's late work in the Swiss mountains.

Atem (Breath)

Randall Mattheis June 2, 2021

Fresh access to this Gerhard Richter painting in the Milwaukee Art Museum permanent collection galleries after all these months invites me to see it freshly. A new favorite.

Its big, wide, and tall. If I stand near it, it fills my periphery. It is hard and urban, made mechanically with harsh colors tearing a soft subtle surface the shading of skin. Slashes, some short and some long and painful with black and orange dripping from the cuts. A Rothko with its radiating orange blocks is in the next room, spiritual. This is the truth of being human and vulnerable in the city. Maybe it’s my current condition, smooth easy life cut open. The old is destroyed. The new blunt raw color revealed, pushing through, but it is not clear where life is leading...painful and sensuous are the journey. Here it is, this big pretentious painting reminding me of past, uncertain present, and emerging future.

The gallery notes on the wall are telling. Atem (Breath) it is called (purchased and acquired by MAM in 1990, the year after it was made). Made by painting in layers of oil color. The first layers of paint set and then a second layer of ephemeral color, the transience of breath. While this new layer is wet, before it has adhered to the layers below, a crinkled plastic sheet is laid on the surface pulling lines of the soft skin away as it is removed. Its handmade, nuanced. Its soft cuts the hard edges of the beginning of what is hidden, preset to be revealed.

Forest Floor with Orange Pine Needles

Randall Mattheis February 15, 2021

This painting comes from my core in a lot of ways. It shows one of the places in the forest that I love, thick pines above, damping the sun. The ground is covered with pine needles that muffle all sounds. Silence. At the end of the day, after a brief rain, the light pushes across the damp lichen encrusted tree trunks. Rough pine bark chunky and flaking.

I had not been to this campground in a long time and was moved by the raw quality of the uncut forest.

It is a few miles from where French-Canadian explorers Jean Nicolet and Pere Jacques Marquette first set foot in this part of the north country in 1673, having canoed across the Great Lakes from Quebec. The mythology of their exploring these wild places resonated with me.

Jean Nicolet coming to shore in Wisconsin, 1673

The orange in my painting is a series of thinned layers built up to give a transparent fleeting quality. The trees are deep and dark, paint thickened and heavy. My intent is to lift the sense of place towards the magic that I have always found in Paul Gauguin’s paintings of the South Pacific. Gauguin uses color and abstraction to evoke the essential story of a place. I am friendly with his “Day of the God” (1894) a painting hung with pride of place at the Art Institute of Chicago. Native women lay on pink sand with the colors of the spirits presented swirling in the water at the edge of the sand. A different place and the same.

Mahana no auta (Day of the God) Paul Gauguin, 1894

Matisse

Randall Mattheis October 9, 2020

At the Art Institute of Chicago, looking for paintings by Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Maurice Vlaminck and George Braque. Their early work, in inspired by Van Gogh, played with the intense color that fuels my painting practice.

I the first Modern gallery, Matisse’s earliest painting may be the best. A still life from 1906 following a summer of artistic discovery in Collioure a town along overlooking the Mediterranean in southern France. Matisse is 37 years old when he finds the spirited color that will make his career.

This early painting, has a rich simple color scheme. The thin paint lets the white of the canvas show through giving the colors an illumination that often is lost when the paint is heavily applied. The blues and reds are more luminous here than the paintings by others nearby in the gallery. The loose transparent color captures a fleeting moment, a pleasure of life in motion. It is no monument to anything. It is life lived.

The painted image is sketchy. There is not a lot of work done trying to spell out detail.

In charcoal sketches throughout his career, you see Matisse working the drawing, putting lines down, rubbing them out, drawing fresh lines. The drawings show hard work as he draws the line again and again, trying to find the right place on the paper. There are several examples of his charcoal sketches in the Richard Gray collection, currently hung at the Art Institute. I think I understand that all those incredible single line drawings by Matisse that you see everywhere, and that he is so famous for come from a process that begins with hard work. He studies and refines exactly what the composition should be, then pulls out a clean sheet of paper and makes a simple drawing.

I wonder if he this is the process he has made on the still life painting with flowers?

Walking two more galleries further is another still life, a bowl of apples from ten years later. The curator’s label proposes that Matisse is following a tradition in painting of the time of completing a quick sketch canvas first, then starting fresh on another canvas to do the final work. This is why this painting also has thinned paint and a sketchy style. I am not sure if the painting on the wall is the sketch or the second “finished” painting.

The vibrant colors and looseness of a bowl of apples give it an immediacy, the presence of the artist experiencing and immersed in something real in front of him.

Henri Matisse, Woman Before and Aquarium, 1926

Across the gallery is another painting of a girl peering into a fishbowl painted another ten years later in 1926. The color is there, but he painting technique is heavier, the work is starting to lose the magic of the earlier work.

Henri Matisse, Lemons on a Pewter Plate, 1926

Another still life in the same gallery from the same year. It is heavy and dead. Matisse is now 57 years, two years younger than me, from the first years after he had moved to Nice. In later paintings, he would try to recapture the luminosity of the thin paint, but the color choices were different. The live immediacy of the early work has been lost.