Image: Hawthorn Contemporary
Colin Matthes - collage
Colin Matthes - collage (ink and watercolor on paper)
Artists Colin Matthes and Scott Espeseth share some basic interests that make their work a congenial pairing in an exhibition space. Each works mainly with fluid black medium on paper in the service of mostly representational imagery. From there though the two diverge, heading in equally fascinating directions into opposite ends of the visual universe. The drama of their sometimes complementary and mostly dialectical relationship is on full display at Hawthorn Contemporary in a show with the cheekiest title of the year, “Seers, Craftsmen.”
Espeseth’s works, although completed in black watercolor, have a less fluid, more rendered feel than what we associate with that painting medium. His works’ precision and consistency declare them more as drawings than paintings, whatever that distinction means anymore, and naturally place emphasis on his carefully selected imagery and the story it tells. That ensemble cast of things consists of some of the most mundane content imaginable: a G.I. Joe comic, a cluster of raw hotdogs, a screened window, with the screen itself in the starring role.
Espeseth finds mini-operas in the banal, the static, and the gray by dimming the extravagance across the board. The three full hot dogs and seven niblets in the aptly titled Hotdog manage to tap into the universal pale mauve of all the uncooked franks we the viewer have stored in our memories, and voila!, there’s color in the colorless; there’s drama in the drama-less. And if there was ever a more unlikely heroic protagonist than a flaccid turkey dog, I can’t think of it ... maybe a used Band-Aid on the floor of a communal gym shower. And yet, the hotdogs swell to a majesty in Espeseth’s carefully bracketed pictorial universe as surely as so many Hapsburg kings or Laocoons do in theirs.
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Image: Hawthorn Contemporary
Scott Espeseth "Buns"
Scott Espeseth "Buns" - watercolor on paper
Black, White and Graphite Gray
Meanwhile across the gallery, Colin Matthes’ work functions in an almost opposite manner. His salon-style walls chock-full of rowdy slapdash black, white and graphite gray figures, strike at first as feral, raw, and subversive. The snakes, dinosaurs, and humanoid creatures all squirming in a sea of kinetic ink spatters and punctuated by occasional pops of color are at first as unruly as uncooked hotdogs are pathetically benign. Only for a few moments, though.
Just as the dialed-down context elevated the profiles of Espeseth’s figures, the initial heightened, beastly vibe of Matthes’ imagery is eventually grounded by their manner of creation, which is more about imagination than menace. The “What” in the work yields slowly to the “how.” The densely clustered, unframed, informal hanging of the works in the gallery also contributes to this read. Ultimately any individual drawing in the show, from a winged double-beaked bird, a wild-eyed alligator, or a reclining female, all Untitled, become parts of a montage dedicated to the greater mission of free-association drawing. The whole overtakes the sum of the show’s corporeal parts, and the corpse is finally more exquisite than macabre.
These two divergent perspectives on drawing provides insight into how content and form activate each other in art. The two elements often function like a Vaudeville duo; there’s invariably a straight guy and a banana man. This contrast between earnest and absurd, or some version of the duality, form the energy cell of most creative enterprises. Contrast and tension looking for equilibrium. Viewers can see a fine display of this phenomenal interaction within and across two separate practices at Hawthorn Contemporary through April 23.
