Joanne Mattera
Artist Statement
The grid has long provided the conceptual underpinning of my painting. In Chromatic Geometry, a series I began in 2013, I’ve skewed the conventional 90-degree structure of the grid so that it has become a field of attenuated diamonds that is part of the physical structure of the painting. Formally I’m thinking about the division of the diamonds into greater or lesser amounts via triangles of color. It’s not mathematical but it is precise, allowing me to resolve relationships of color and shape. Each little triangular shape is a fulcrum that affects the equipoise of the field.
With the horizontal division of the field into two hues, something else is taking place: an ambiguous figure-ground relationship. Those differently sized triangles are now visually kinetic, shifting between foreground and the deeper space suggested by that planar meeting of hues. I hadn’t intended it— I was thinking formally about color and composition–but there it is, a welcome surprise in the order of things.
Artist Bio
Joanne Mattera is a widely exhibited painter who works in a style that is chromatically resonant and compositionally reductive. She is a colorist best known for her geometric abstractions in encaustic. Her paintings and prints are in the collections of the New Britain Museum of Art, Connecticut; the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., and institutional and private collections around the world. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and multiple other publications. Her paintings are included in Geoform, an online curatorial project featuring geometric abstraction. Currently she is showing in Formal Aspects, a six-painter exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, Massachusetts.
Over the course of a 40-year career, Joanne has expanded her practice to include writing and curating. She is the author of The Art of Encaustic Painting, the 2001 book that helped define a medium and create a community, and the ongoing Joanne Mattera Art Blog, in which she reports on art in New York City, the Miami art fairs, and elsewhere.
Joanne is a newly elected member of American Abstract Artists, an organization founded in 1936 in New York City to promote and foster the understanding of abstract and non-objective art. She lives and works in New York City and Salem, Massachusetts.
Selected Exhibitions
2015 Joanne Mattera: The Silk Road Paintings Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, New York
2014 Chromatic Reasoning Conrad Wilde Gallery, Tucson
2013 Chromatic Geometries Arden Gallery, Boston
2012 Soie Structural Madness, New York City
2011 Diamond Life Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
2010 Viewing Room Heidi Cho Gallery, New York City
2010 Travel With Me Arden Gallery, Boston
2008 Contemplating the Horizontal Arden Gallery, Boston
2008 Hue Again Schlosberg Gallery, Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Mass. (Curators: Leonie Bradbury and Shana Dumont)
2007 Silk Road OK Harris Works of Art, New York City
2007 It’s Always About Hue, Isn’t It? Cervini Haas Gallery, Scottsdale
2006 Heat of the Moment Arden Gallery, Boston
2006 Pure Color Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
2006 10 Years of Encaustic Painting Winfisky Gallery, Salem State University, Salem, Mass.
2004 New Paintings Arden Gallery, Boston
2004 New Paintings Simon Gallery, Morristown, New Jersey
2004 New Paintings Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
2003 New Paintings Arden Gallery, Boston
2003 Mudra: New Paintings Cervini Haas Gallery, Scottsdale
2002 Uttar: New Paintings Simon Gallery, Morristown
2001 New Encaustic Paintings Cervini Haas Gallery, Scottsdale
2000 New Encaustic Paintings Arden Gallery, Boston
2000 Verso: Thought, Breath, Memory Espace Gallery, Manila, Philippines
1999 New Paintings Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
1996 Linear Perspectives OK Harris Works of Art, New York City
1995 New Paintings in Encaustic Stephen Haller Gallery, New York City
