matthew haggett
at butters gallery
Like some mad mathematician
sucking down umbrella drinks, painter Matthew Haggett mixes
algorithmic rigor with 1960s tiki-bar chic in his fifth outing
at Butters Gallery. The mid-career artist revisits the
totemic, South Seas-style imagery that has become his
signature but evolves in ways that could not have been
anticipated. A self-professed “math geek” since high school,
Haggett begins his works on computer, basing his compositions
on geometric patterns, usually fractals and algorithms. After
creating and cutting stencils based on these patterns, he
traces them onto wood panels, then applies multiple layers of
acrylic paint.
The elaborate process has its payoffs.
The finished paintings, despite the rigor of their genesis,
come across as jaunty and intuitive, if not flat-out fun. With
the graded luminosity of their surfaces, the delicate
interlacing of their motifs, and their often earth-toned
palette, the works emanate easy charm yet do not give up all
their secrets. Vaulting into three dimensions, the artist
hangs painted Plexiglas panels from the ceiling and affixes
them to the gallery walls and floors, turning the space into a
de facto installation. Haggett even offers a stereoscope
through which gallery-goers can view 3-D versions of his
compositions.
Many of the works riff on the phenomenon
of anamorphic distortion: shapes that shift when regarded from
specific vantage points. The wall stencils, for example, are
ovals, but from certain angles they appear as perfect circles.
Refreshingly, there are works such as Sky-Colored
Signal that depart from the artist’s geometric flights of
fancy, favoring more organic teardrop- or picket-fence-like
motifs. Watercolors such as Sun Machine and Atomic
Cherry Kiss, lacking the acrylic pieces’ lacquer-like
layering, come across as flat by comparison, while Haggett’s
figurative Peripatetic Somnambulist series, with its
Surrealist-meets-sci-fi fantasias, leave one wishing the
artist had stuck with what he does best: geometric
abstraction.
Dec 2006 by richard
speer
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