When Matt came in to record this conversation, he had a gift in a bag for us: a cigar box "totally filled with paint scraps and like just smears of wet paint until the cigar box is totally full and kind of mounded over with paint." He got the idea from his grad school teacher Squeak Carnwath, and the rule for filling it was simple: "Whenever I had a bit of paint that I needed to scrape off, boom, it's onto the top of the box." Before we hung up the mics we had already offered it a pedestal in the show.
The box is a good way into Penti Menti, a title that plays on the painting term pentimenti, the visible traces of an artist's process. "These traces can be layers of paint, the energy held in a juicy brushstroke, remnants of altered compositions or evidence of fixing mistakes," Matt says in the press release, and he carries the idea out into the land around his home: "The geologic marks and scars on the landscape are Nature's pentimenti. They are the accumulated effects of time and natural forces."
The paintings start outdoors with sumi ink, which he uses "to observe the landscape near my home in northern New Mexico more attentively, and to deepen my wonder and curiosity about this incredible place." Grid-based patterns come in after that, and Matt describes the back and forth between the two layers like this: "There is a constant push and pull between the pattern and the image. I'm trying to make them work together, but I also enjoy the moments when they fight with each other — there is something of a game in it." The newest paintings bring in waves, and when he talks about them he gets physical, since "the waves really allow me to like move around, almost kind of dance with it." He seems happy to let the work run a step ahead of him, which he put this way when we asked: "I like the paintings to be like just ahead of my understanding, and then kind of figure it out later." We've been circling each other's work for about a decade now, and I haven't seen these waves in person yet.
The show spills past painting, too, with etchings, linocuts, large ink paintings on folded and quilted paper, and the first ceramics Matt has ever shown, made with Frank Lanzante, who teaches ceramics at Santa Fe Prep and works in the studio next door to him. One piece is a wall installation of the phases of the moon, built from red New Mexican clay and white slip. Once the slip dries to the right consistency, Lanzante throws handfuls of water at it, and "it makes these craters." Matt also told us about glazed tiles he has been leaving on old bridges and underpasses out in nature, "just kind of leaving them as like future artifacts for people to bump into." Of the ceramics collaboration he says, "We hope this is the beginning of a long, collaborative clay adventure."