Fort Worth Community Art Center Art in the Dark
Matthew Bourbon: Hive at the Fort Worth Community Fine art Middle challenges united states of america to settle our buzzing brains through bold color, composition, and paint-manipulation strategies.
Matthew Bourbon: Hive
September 10–October 30, 2021
Fort Worth Community Fine art Center, Fort Worth
Matthew Bourbon used to make "monkey mind" paintings, a term meditators utilize to describe how our thoughts battle with the world all day long. Bourbon is an older guy (51), and he lost involvement in "defensive" paintings—those that lead with heavy-handed ideas—about four years ago.
The human form is now gone from his art. And so is the smashing of the visual field and sly references to art history. Today, Bourbon—a professor of drawing and painting at the University of North Texas in Denton for 20-1 years—makes gorgeous works that seethe with visual intelligence. He's dumped all the clever conversations and replaced them with a dollop of soul, particularly in his exhibition Hive.
This display of eight paintings past Bourbon, currently on view at the Fort Worth Customs Art Middle through October thirty, 2021, doesn't stoop to sentimentality. The spirit of humor haunts each of these works, which were all completed in the by twelvemonth. Like it was for the work of many artists, the COVID-19 lockdown was a happy accelerator of Bourbon'south aesthetic production.
The biggest ghost (and comedic way) that shadows these paintings is that of the tardily, bully Canadian-American artist Philip Guston. In his long career, the groovy influencer cycled from figurative painter to Abstruse Expressionist, to figurative painter once over again.
Bourbon seems to draw from Guston's last ii mode iterations—he as well has the artist'due south aforementioned careful impact with the castor. Bourbon's penchant for positioning alone shapes in indefinable imagistic fields gives his artworks the same funny, awkward, and absurd vibe that Guston channeled.
In Bourbon's minor "hive" of works (all titles end with the word "Head"), each key, biomorphic shape hangs out on a narrow proscenium—like a haystack set up against one of those seamless paper backdrops used past photographers, or adrift in infinite similar a wobbling UFO in the heaven. The shapes are funny because they linger in their various voids with a sort of bullish pride. They're just modest shapes, after all, but—a lot like a fatty cow in a field—they but won't terminate insisting on the importance of their presence.
Bourbon—an accomplished journalist who has written for Flash Fine art, Artforum, and ARTnews—is also a meditator who leads the online Iron Bell Zen mindfulness grouping. This dispensation towards thoughtfulness is evident in his modestly sized works.
The artist doesn't knock you out with the physical size of his canvases (even as he manages to create a special sense of space/no-space in the works). The biggest of the bunch, Cultivation Head, is 60 by seventy-2 inches while the dimensions of Island Head dial down to a smallish eighteen by xxx inches. Each easel-sized painting murmurs along with the wisdom a of guy who's been pushing aesthetic boundaries for five decades now.
In that location are so many things that win me over in Bourbon's work, especially his color choices. The artist's hues are saturated and bright, and he'due south a master of the play of complementaries and primaries—a lot like Stuart Davis or Nina Chanel Abney, but, to me, more sophisticated than either of these artists.
Like his shapes, Bourbon'south colors fizz with humor. At that place's something goofily bossy about them—like a three-yr-old who stands up with a wooden spoon and tries to conduct the howling of her domestic dog. They jump at you, and they bounce all over the color bike, dragging your eye this way and that, while never getting acidic, moody, or bashing you over the head. They stay in line, frankly trip the light fantastic around the canvas, and make you lot experience at habitation with the work.
Matthew Bourbon: Hive is scheduled to remain on brandish through Oct xxx, 2021, at the Fort Worth Community Fine art Center, 1300 Gendy Street.
Source: https://southwestcontemporary.com/review-matthew-bourbon-hive-at-the-fort-worth-community-art-center/
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