MATT KLEBERG: CATERWAULER

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1 MATT KLEBERG: CATERWAULER

2 CATERWAULER, 2016 OILSTICK ON CANVAS 72 x 58 INCHES

3 CATACOMB CATAPULT (FOR EDDIE), 2016 OIL STICK ON CANVAS 84 x 63 INCHES

4 FLIM FLAM, 2016 OIL STICK ON CANVAS 60 x 48 INCHES

5 CRUNCH CRUNCH, SLAM SLAM, DINKY DINKY, 2016 OIL STICK ON CANVAS 78 x 120 INCHES

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10 MATT KLEBERG: CATERWAULER 9 July 27 August, 2016 One way to understand the medium of painting is as the stage both physical and metaphorical on which the artist sets a scene of sorts. In the Western tradition of painting since the Renaissance culture, politics, and taste determined what could and should be represented, while linear perspective organized how the scene may be set, everything falling into its proper place through this logic, as if inevitably. Even deviations from this logic serve to reinforce it by standing out and giving rise to an aesthetic frisson, emphasizing the crucial role played by the ideological components of the setting in determining how we understand what happens within it. In a way this continues to hold true even as painting becomes abstract, in which case the scene that is set may become that of harmonies and disharmonies between shapes and colors. Yet this is still a story of sorts, much as the symphonics of an opera drive the plot along, through abstract, yet emotive means. Accordingly, one way to describe the task of painting is as one of selecting which objects or what subject matter to populate the scene with. In this sense even the putative zero-degree of painting, the monochrome canvas, can be read as either a refusal to introduce any subject matter whatsoever, or else to propose as content the material and/or optical presence of a singular color experience. Similarly, the shaped canvas determines the organization of content literally in the way that perspective formerly did metaphorically. If the art historian Michael Fried has famously suggested that theatricality s interfacing of the painting with the viewer must be defeated by the painting s presentness, which is to say its sealing itself off from the beholder as a scene which the viewer beholds from a distance, then Kleberg both follows this path and extends it in a new direction, and even more so in more pared-down compositions that depict one or a few of these turning corners, without stage setting effects. Quite literally so, given that the viewer of one of Kleberg s paintings is not so much invited onto the stage it depicts, as they are beckoned to move through and off it into some unknown, but not threatening, space. This poses a fundamental question about what we can know through the five senses, using the essential illusionism of painting its ability to suggest something beyond the evidently given and known to challenge any excessive reliance on empiricism, implying all the possible moral, even political, pitfalls of a nothing but the facts mentality. Alex Bacon For these reasons it is logical that many abstract painters begin first as figurative painters, even today when both options are presented to the student of painting as equally viable paths. Matt Kleberg is one of these painters, and in his case it was the ways in which both the material and the illusory elements of painting set the stage for what is depicted, determining to some degree how it will look, and how in turn we will interpret it that became his subject. Increasingly he intuitively recognized this theatrical element of painting and found ways to integrate it through suggestions of framing devices that abstractly suggest such things as the proscenium arch of the classical stage, and curtains drawn apart, as if inviting us to wait for some action to take place. This is not unlike Picasso s backdrops for Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau s Parade, which suggest the stage itself, on which his earlier Cubist forms are given as the actors, which shows Picasso s self-consciousness in 1917 about Cubism being simply one form of representation available to him, among others, such as the Neo-Classicism he had more recently developed, and which serves as the setting his Cubist costumes populate. Several things complicate Kleberg s paintings, moving them beyond being simply evocations of abstract stages. For one, they are painted in a dense, material fashion with oil stick, which resists them being optically flattened into an imaginative, graphic representation. Rather the painted marks sit quite obdurately atop the canvas. Secondly, Kleberg utilizes a banded compartmentalization of the canvas into repeating stripes of different colors. However, unlike one of Frank Stella s Concentric Squares, which one might initially think of in seeing such a sequencing of color, this order is not logical and systematic, it follows only Kleberg s painterly intuition, which as a result causes the painting to resist a reading of it as an abstract perspectival plunge. This arbitrary ordering of colors causes the different bands to push and pull back and forth from each other in small ways, ultimately keeping the eye floating in a shallow, if undulating space that is felt to be close to the painting s surface. Then there is the subject matter itself, which is often a sense of extended space that continues beyond what we can see in the painting itself. Corners turn, beckoning us to unknown interiors somewhere offstage, as it were. This serves to both clearly delimit our literal purview, while also suggesting a theoretical boundlessness beyond it, a sensation that painting is perhaps uniquely capable of conjuring. HIRAM BUTLER GALLERY 4520 BLOSSOM STREET HOUSTON TEXAS HIRAMBUTLER.COM