MATTHEW KING: Eternal Bliss

Marvin Gardens is pleased to announce the opening of “Eternal Bliss,” a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Matthew King. This show evidences a continuation and expansion of the artist’s focus on combining hard-edged abstraction with collaged images culled from various offset print sources.

Incredibly crisp at a distance, up close the tactile quality of the paint handling shifts to reveal a precise cross pattern of brush marks suggesting the weave of canvas or linen, albeit the supports of these works are the more modern and industrial aluminum panel.

King’s cyclical dialogue continues to flip back and fourth between image/object/picture –and- painting/photo/collage to build works imbued with a sense of searching, longing, and experimentation. In some of the newest works, scaled up aluminum panels relegate the photo collage to just a quarter of the picture-plane, while ambitious compositional risks are laid out in large swaths of “blank” painted-in sections. These large panels keep the quintessential photographic ration of 4x5 in tact as they scale up.

Colors are carefully mixed to harmonize with tones found in the offset printing process, and as the analog of eye-and-hand seamlessly meets technological artifact, we are left with a sense of balance between the two. An achievement underscored by a sense that these images never had a moment of imbalance, as if through searching King has found moments that have always been with us suspended in time.