HENRY MATHIEU
’AS GOOD A TIME AS ANY’

Opening November 6th | Reception for Henry Mathieu 5:00-7:00 PM | Rachel Walls Fine Art, 116 Free Street in Portland, Maine

Rachel Walls Fine Art is pleased to present As Good A Time As Any  a solo exhibition of paintings by Henry Mathieu exploring the unexpected beauty of the everyday landscape, the pleasures of sustained observation, and the unlikely possibility of glancing against sublime.

As understood by the Romantic painters of the nineteenth century, the sublime is an aesthetic concept describing an experience of greatness, awe, terror and wonder that exceeds human measurement and rational understanding. Artists like J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich sought to capture that sensation through dramatic light, atmospheric effects, and monumental landscapes.

Mathieu is interested in both embracing and inverting this art historical concept. Feeling plenty of terror scrolling through the daily headlines, Mathieu looks to landscape painting as a reprieve from the unrelenting pace of change in the modern world. If we slow down long enough to really look, can we be awestruck by a dying palm tree illuminated by a streetlight in the neutral ground of a strip mall parking lot? 

His paintings frequently depict a juxtaposition of the natural environment and the built environment:  power lines obstructing ridge lines, vegetation encroaching on asphalt, cellphone towers masquerading as trees, etc. Roads and other artifacts of human engineering cut through the landscape, sometimes providing a destination, sometimes becoming destinations in themselves. Rarely is nature presented without evidence of human intervention. Instead, these intrusions become part of the subject, with all their awkwardness, humor, and occasional grace.

Mathieu's highly saturated palette pushes these ordinary scenes toward a kind of hyper-reality. Colors are exaggerated, but not necessarily invented. The resulting paintings occupy a space somewhere between observation and hallucination, representation, and abstraction. If the Romantics relied upon monumental scale to envelope the viewer, Mathieu aims to produce a similar sensation with vibrant color, turning otherwise unremarkable scenes into something approaching a waking dream.

Working largely from his own reference photography, Mathieu regards a photograph as a kind of short-form record of looking, while a painting is something closer to long-form. Painting demands a different quality of attention. Hours spent studying the particularities of a subject reveal colors, relationships, and incidental details that might otherwise go unnoticed. What the painter chooses to emphasize, distort, omit, or abstract becomes a record not simply of a place, but of the experience of looking at it.

Underlying the work is a conviction that the practice of painting is itself a worthwhile pursuit, quite apart from whatever ends the finished painting might serve. For Mathieu, the anachronistic act of making a painting is a willful expression of optimism. It is a commitment to finding wonder in the world as it actually is. If the Romantics were telescoping, Mathieu is microscoping. Where they sought transcendence in boundlessness, he finds it in specificity, intimacy, solitude, and the infinitely interesting pursuit of just looking around.

EXHIBITION PREVIEW

All Images © Henry Mathieu