Abecedarium

Repurposing images of the past and inventing new shapes and future forms is the basis for this current suite of prints.  Originally painted on heavy poster board but conceived as the basis for archival pigment inkjet prints, the images were digitally flattened while maintaining the integrity of the hand-painted line.  The prints are meant to be read in sequence or individually as an abecedarium, the symbols are personal, and reference art historical precedents, numerology, literature, the tantra and vernacular of the every day.  

‘Black Radish’ takes its title from a small publishing imprint of the same name and is meant to read visually as a zero with the central ovoid form also becoming a meditative focal point relative to Tantric drawing and painting. 

A proposition that follows from one already proved forms the structure of ‘Corollary’.  The screens of security monitors and restaurant seating charts have proven to be fertile ground for exploration of an abstraction based on a kind of random order.  Sci-fi alien language comes to mind in how the forms are laid out and this, in turn, becomes another linguistic reference in the abecedarium series.  

‘Red Seven’ is the talisman and lucky number that has served as both image and inspiration in my work since the beginning.  It becomes the thought post of the seven images that comprise the suite. 

‘Scripture’ was inspired by both a reading of Virginia Woolf’s novel ‘The Waves’ and also my work as a laborer on a seismic crew exploring for oil on the border of Texas and Mexico. 

The mirrored upper case J’s of 'Green Janus’ are a celebration of both jay-ness and my own interests in iterative rows of lower case j’s and the idea that an uppercase J is in fact three-quarters of an uppercase U. 

‘Window’ is based on an actual window as seen at Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, the circular forms were heavy plugs of dark amethyst glass embedded in stone.  The central mandala speaks of the meeting between East and West in this ancient city. 

‘Three Points’ focuses on the black negative spaces that form the letter M (the initial of my name) and the Roman numeral for 1000, 1 standing for the cardinal number of quantity and three zeroes representing sacred unity.  The letter M probably started as a picture sign of water, as in Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and very early Semitic writing. 

Each picture then has a narrative and an autobiography emerges that speaks to the evolution of my practice and how and why certain images are repeated, reinvented and re-explored.

-Matt Magee