Matthew Blackwell “Southwest by Northeast”

Edward Thorp Gallery

poster for Matthew Blackwell “Southwest by Northeast”

This event has ended.

Santa Fe, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear Santa Fe Since I’m never going to cease to roam
I’m never ever far from home
But I’ll build a geodesic dome and sail away…
­ Bob Dylan, ”Santa Fe,” 1967

Southwest by Northeast w​ill be Matthew Blackwell’s sixth solo show at the Edward Thorp Gallery and will include recent mixed media paintings, sculpture, and drawings.

In navigational terms, the title of the exhibit implies a course that is truly ”can’t get there from here,” the impossibility of reaching opposite places through conflicting direction. But Matthew Blackwell does arrive at his southwest ­ via a recent Guggenheim Fellowship award ­ and finds many similarities between New Mexico, where members of his family now reside, and Maine, where the artist had lived and found inspiration for the last fifteen years. In the small studio he rents on the outskirts of Santa Fe at the end of the Pecos trail, the locale provides him a view, a wonder world of red mountains and cadmium yellow plains, where the light and the weather changes dramatically, the squalls from Mexico blowing in much like the down­East’ers in Maine.

In Blackwell’s new inspired paintings,​a​​v​ision​i​s delivered with his characteristically thoughtful yet playful humor. His new large scale paintings are often raw and spontaneous, skillfully utilizing the surface of the unprimed canvas and incorporating more collage and drawing elements than previously. As before, however, he conjures significance through his choice of materials, accompanied frequently by lyrical voices from his musical playlist: they vary from early blues music ­ like The Memphis Jug Band ­ to Bob Dylan to Mexican accordion driven rhythms.

Many of the sculptures, sourced from a variety of scrap wood found in an old trailer on his Santa Fe property, were created on a fabricating table he similarly found in a pinyon pine grove. He fashions some small free standing wood sculptures in the manner of Santos figures, and lets himself be guided by the native New Mexican carvers from the nineteenth century.

Similarly inspired by elements of folk styles are several on­metal figure paintings, influenced by the tin retablo form, which in turn inform his watercolors. One particularly lavish piece, depicting the figure St. Raphael who cured his blind father with a magic fish, incorporates washes and glazes of paint applications giving off a luminous yet robust physical quality.

Blackwell’s art harnesses a variety of messages and mediums constantly probing, always with an imaginative driving authority.

Media

Schedule

from February 11, 2016 to March 19, 2016

Opening Reception on 2016-02-11 from 18:00 to 20:00

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