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MATTHEW VAREY: STILLNESS RAMPANT
Gary Michael Dault
May 6, 2004
One of the paradoxes powering Matthew Varey’s sumptuous new paintings centres upon the fact that they appear to be both simultaneously still and, at the same time, awash with movement.
Another lies in the way they are apparently teeming with incident and, at the same time, as empty as silence. If we intercut both paradoxes, it is then possible to suggest that the paintings are both serene with convulsion and tumultuous with silence.
How can this be so? Partly—inevitably—it is the result of their making. The very chemical (and, in the end, almost alchemical) fact that Varey paints the pictures employing a suspension of powdered pigments and metals in resin means that it is deep within the nature of the paintings that they should begin as fluid, mercurial things, wet and flowing, and that as this wetness grows turgid and ponderous with the closure of drying times, the initial dramatic and balletic swish of the medium’s movement should slow to the magmic, the inchoate, to a gradual, seized-up thingness.
The deftness required on Varey’s part—to decide what the painting will be, and where it will go, and what it will offer when it comes to ground, chemically speaking—is thus the product of a thousand split-second aesthetic actions on his part. In essence, he must make the decisions and revisions, have the thoughts and rethinkings, that every artist must handle—but at an accelerated speed. In work like this, what appears to be a kind of procedural automatism is, in fact, fragmented and downloaded into a calculus of rapid ponderings and concomitant actions. Which goes some distance toward shaping one’s feeling that even methodologically speaking, these are Paintings For Our Time.
Give the fact of his method of production, it is no small achievement on Matthew Varey’s part that his paintings so satisfyingly transcend their industrial givens and processes. They do so on a number of fronts, but primarily by means of their imagery (if it is still possible to refer to Varey’s complex surfaces as carrying imagery), and their colour.
Imagistically, the paintings are positioned between two poles: apocalyptic sweeps of shape-as-energy—as in the ice-blue Prayer Painting #37, with its big fluid thrust to the right (a Hokusai-like Great Wave), and with a certain eddying of colour in its wake, and, by contrast, almost evacuated fields of planar colour with isolated colonies of incident—as in the algae-green Prayer Painting #48. It is perhaps not useful to talk in a conventional way about composition in Varey’s work because that sort of discussion almost always comes down to certain figure-ground considerations, where subject A is assigned a strategic place on background B. In Varey’s work, by contrast, subject and support are one. The only composing in it—and there is composing here—comes from the disposition of his chosen medium on vistas of itself. How can we tell the dancer from the dance? asked the poet Yeats and it’s a good question with which to probe a Matthew Varey.
Varey’s colour—his ice-blues, turquoises, bitter golds, green-golds, brown-golds, honey yellows, gunmetal greys, ox-blood reds, and those remarkable deep purple-reds—a colour filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci once decribed as "inter-uterine"—is both artificial and, in a strange sense, primordial. Looking at it is like remembering that O degrees and 360 degrees are side by side on a circle. It’s resin and metal, yes. And is therefore—like the colours of colour TV and computer monitors—colour nobody had ever seen fifty years ago. It is our colour. But it is also planetary colour: the colour of water and ice, the decay and regrowth of vegetation, the colour of dried blood, of felled wood, of mineral outcropping, the colours of the sea. The spectrum of the primordial stew. Which is to say that Varey’s colour is brand new and, at the same time, has always been with us, that it is the colour of time itself.
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