Catalog Introduction to Matthias Van Arkel’s full color exhibition catalog
Silicone Dreams
Hung like structurally freed paintings
projected into space, Matthias van Arkel’s
tactile, enigmatic forms beg consideration
– for they embody a somewhat premeditated
bipolar and confounding set of aesthetics. On
the one hand, they call to mind the sumptuous
painterliness and adept manipulation
of palette in the tradition of Abstract
Expressionism or Impressionism – comparable
to the intuitive perspicuity of Willem de
Kooning or the immutable language of color
employed by Matisse. On the other hand, this
achievement is complicated by the paradoxical
conundrum that paint, in the traditional
sense at least, is in fact entirely devoid from
the paintings: van Arkel instead uses Platina
Silicone Rubber — ironically recontextualizing
Minimalism’s use of industrial materials — to
“paint.” In this sense, van Arkel’s meta-
pictures employ circuitous methods to address
the signified — a dialectical stance that uses
metaphor to critique logic — not unlike using
one language to describe another, or words
to describe images. Van Arkel effectively
refutes the modernist presupposition that
abstraction’s anti-iconographic stance was
carried to a logical conclusion.
Furthermore, the works’ ethereal evocation
of “light” (both in the material’s opacity
and seeming weightlessness) is belied only
by their imposing presence- weighing up
to 50 kilos, necessitating the forms to be
bolted to the wall. Of course, as with all
formal elements within his work, functional
solutions dually operate as part and parcel
of van Arkel’s carefully conceived conceptual
framework. The bolts are an interesting case
in point. Literally moving through the image
itself, they call attention to the works’
physicality and spatial complexity, reminding
the viewer that the paintings, in fact,
truly occupy multi-dimensions. This marks a
significant strategic departure; while most
painters throughout the annals of history
achieved depth through planar illusion – for
example, Cezanne’s manipulation of color
and volume to achieve new perspective — here
van Arkel does so in an “honest” physical or
“literal” fashion, facetiously achieving giant
strides by appearing to do so with ease.
Of this deceptively “dogmatic” approach
to the works, van Arkel recently noted:
“It’s like the Shaker movement’s approach
to the chair, either you can use it, or you
can hang it on the wall in all its simplicity —
or complexity, if you prefer.” Van Arkel’s
approach calls to mind the conceptual pranks
of Bruce Nauman — or perhaps more aptly,
embodies a certain Duchampian gesture.
Not dissimilar to painting a mustache on the
Mona Lisa, van Arkel’s bolts literally degrade
or violate the “holy” surface of the canvas
and, by extension, re-insert the heavy-
handed “spiritualist” dialogue of Abstract
Expressionism with a much-needed sense of
play.
In unpacking the works, I find it apt that
van Arkel describes the paintings as coming
into being in the mornings, somewhere
between sleep and waking consciousness,
a liminal space both rooted in reality and
yet fundamentally abstracted from it. Van
Arkel’s works cohesively unify the ineffable
dichotomy between the real and the imagined
as described by Baudelaire in his seminal
text, “The Painter of Modern Life;” at once
seeking “the eternal and the immutable” as
well as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the
contingent.” Van Arkel’s “Silicone Dreams”
straddle the realms of form and function,
immediacy and delay, imagination and
possibility, rational thought and spontaneous
creation. In a recent conversation with the
artist, van Arkel described them eloquently
as the “skins” of paintings “hung like
jackets” on gallery walls. Van Arkel’s greatest
feat, perhaps, is both collapsing and re-
constructing pre-existing art-historical
tropes. He literally casts off the canon of
painting’s heavy metaphorical “jacket” —
transforming the discipline’s rhetoric both in
order to subvert it and further entrench it
within its own history. His imagined canvases
shrug their archaic cloaks of pigment,
securely fastened as if to prevent them from
disappearing back into the vast ethereal
dreamscape from whence they came.