NYAB Event - Matakia “Spontaneous Combustion II”

Matakia “Spontaneous Combustion II”

Viridian Artists, Inc.

This event has ended.

Viridian Artists presents “Spontaneous Combustion II,” a retrospective by Matakia (aka Diane Root).

Described by some as a “latter-day Abstract Expressionist,” Matakia’s work is primarily executed in acrylics on canvas or paper, often with touches of pen and ink, collage and mixed media. Of French and American parentage, she grew up and was schooled in the US and Europe, graduating from the Sorbonne. Later, she studied briefly at the Beaux Arts in Paris and the Annex of the Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Still, she feels largely self-taught as an artist.

She was brought up in an artistic environment replete with artists, musicians, and writers, thanks to her father, a journalist whose work made the world of fine arts and travels to foreign lands an integral part of the landscape of her childhood.

The artist has traveled the world and glimpses of all that she has experienced can be seen in the lifetime journey that is her art. By eleven, after a transatlantic solo trip on an ocean liner, she disembarked in the South of France, and knew that she was and would always be, a painter.

Though Matakia does not show often in gallery settings, she has had one-woman shows in Athens, Greece; Saudi Arabia, the Ivory Coast, Australia and the US, as well as in her native France. This will be her first solo exhibit at Viridian.

“I am,” she says, “what the French call une illustre inconnue (“an illustrious unknown”). For Matakia “Art is a voyage in and of itself; it is more than what you see at first glance, it is what the mind’s eye glimpses in the distance. It is not only where you are, but where you are transported”.

Hardly a household name by her own admission, her works are nevertheless to be found in private collections all over the world. Viridian is pleased to be sharing the works of this fascinating artist.