If you too find yourself in Pousette-Dart overload by the end of "The Living Edge," be sure to head down to the far end of the first floor, where you'll find a small but impressive exhibition called "Matthew Carone: Recent Works," part of the museum's Florida Artists Series. There are only 27 pieces in the show -- 18 in acrylic on canvas, nine in mixed media on paper -- but all are worth a look, and a few are outstanding.
Carone, who was born in New Jersey in 1930, is a sort of latter-day surrealist who took a detour into abstract expressionism and back. All but one of the pieces shown here are from the past two years. The works on paper are the most abstract, while the acrylics tend to focus on human and animal forms, although highly distorted.
The first (and oldest) picture is the mordantly witty Jacob and the Angel (Tango II), which, as the title indicates, turns the biblical wrestling match between Jacob and the angel into a grim tango. Carone is a protégé of Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta, whose influence is clearly present in many of the other paintings, but in this case, the muse seems to have been Francis Bacon.
Matta, Bacon, and perhaps others appear to be the spirits presiding over Carone's most startling painting shown here, a large acrylic called -- and the image is overpowering even before you read the title -- September 11th, 2001. Rather than try to capture the horror of that day in any literal way, Carone has abstracted it, transformed it into atmosphere.
To the left of the canvas is an elongated, vaguely human-looking creature whose oversized red spinal column appears to be fragmenting. In the center is a tangle of shapes suggesting both humans and animals, and to the right are two swaths of red -- the World Trade Center towers? -- collapsing into an X.
We've all been inundated with so many images of that fateful day that it's hard to imagine someone making us see it in an altogether new way. Carone has done it by creating an aura of dread, anguish, sorrow, and more -- all the unforgettable, ineffable feelings associated with 9/11.
Matt's work relates the transformation of being by the gestures and the effects of the encounter ----and by the breath of our deep being when it is married to color. This is the image that looks for-- that dances,-- that jumps on one foot to be joined to the tracks of the invisible one. With the microscope of its traits, with lines and spheres, Matt recreates under our eyes this ball of energy that the painters send to one another ---of Piero Della Francesca of Marcel Duchamp of his brother Nick of Hans Hoffman, of Matta to Matt Carone. This universal ball contains the dialogue of the painters in themselves and with one another. This is this ball that we catch in flight … While looking at it enter into ourselves or the blissful world of Matt or the "personages" by their meeting, it awakens us to our body, to our gestures and we are invited to participate … When I look at a work by Matt, I feel small tinglings in all my body but especially at the end of my fingers. This is a response of my deep being to what it proposes. Painting is the soul of language, it allows us to represent ourselves in the new spaces of consciousness while our brain transforms itself to find their representations by the hands of artists. Matt puts us in the hand ----the compass-- to explore together these new territories. Matt leads us in his immense trade of knowledge of paint and beings, it does not do the painting but leaves the painting to be done ….. Federica Matta, March 3, 2010
His large-scale canvases reflect spontaneity of color, texture and emotional tangle of line that instantly attracts the viewer. Carone maintains that his work is drawn from the subconscious and his process of subject matter selection is influenced by his dreams, which are about different shapes and forms and vigorous movement. The activities of his humanoid abstract figures usually displayed against multihued backgrounds are reminiscent of the work of the Surrealists, Matta, Gorky, DeKooning and Francis Bacon. These large-scale figures radiate movement and tension demanding the viewer's attention. Although color blind, Carone attributes his rich and dramatic use of color to his ability to see values, not colors, allowing him to be more sensitive to lights and darks.
Dear "CAR-ONE"
I can't see how to write about drawings. A few lines about lines.
Mainly, if the lines of the drawings are lines of forces. Now, how to see the real forces that are driving these lines. And again, how am I to know that the forces of the lines I shall write will mean what the lines of the drawings mean? Etc., etc., etc.—it is already a cast of lines. Next comes the play, and to see if it is a drama or a comedy, which the lines are playing for us. It is all there, in the artist's lines growing in search of us, and we shall give birth together,
knowing that it is all about "US" vs. "IN" the artist!" Roberto Matta
matt -
the new work is remarkable all around. i love the raw, tentative quality of the drawings, but even more i love the combustibility of the paintings. the best of them bring to my mind the image of francis bacon and matta colliding in the middle of a busy marketplace. i esp. like "the lamadook is not a kangaroo," "observe a story," "the advocate rides a hobby-horse," and even moreso "he rides a weather vane" and "seeing through the wall." and i think "come play with my toys" is simply magnificent. are any of these in florida, or will they be at any point? i would love to see them in person if you would grant me that privilege -- i am sure the brushwork comes across much more fully live and in person. i have printed off copies of these so i have them to look at when i am home. anyway, congratulations on these. you seem to have been caught up in a great vortex of creativity. - michael (p.s. - what is a lamadook? i know i have seen the term previously but cannot place it.)
By Michael Mills Thursday, Jan 26 2006
Abstraction and figuration coexist uneasily, often within the same painting, in the output of Matthew Carone, whose recent work is now on view at Lurie Fine Art Galleries in Boca Raton. The New Jersey-born artist has been a South Florida force since 1959, when he opened the Fort Lauderdale gallery he ran for decades. Among the artists he represented was the great Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta, who became a friend and mentor. Not surprisingly, Matta's influence is much in evidence in the Lurie show, which includes about a dozen-and-a-half various-sized acrylics and takes up more than half the gallery. (Assistant director Dena Lyons says additional paintings can be seen by request.) Like the Chilean's work, Carone's is often populated by beings who have assumed only the most rudimentary human form on their journey from artist's subconscious to canvas or board. This lack of full definition characterizes Carone's best paintings, which are suggestive rather than illustrative, as in the dazzling Dialogue, a highly gestural piece featuring two vaguely defined figures huddled claustrophobically close. In this and other works here, Carone's abstract surrealism also conjures up a less obvious influence: the more stripped-down, methodical approach of Francis Bacon. The ghostly bald head that seems to float in the 12-by-9-inch portrait Suspicion, for instance, is masterly on its own but also works as Carone's take on some Bacon portraits, including his study from the life mask of William Blake. Lurie, which is one of eight galleries in Boca's Gallery Center, also currently features a batch of striking Robert Rauschenberg prints, and while you're at the complex, you might as well check out other highlights: recent hyperrealist oils by Janet Fish at Gallery Camino Real; Miró works on paper at Rosenbaum Contemporary; and glass artist Clifford Rainey's Boyhood — A Series of Mono Casts and Preparatory Drawings at Habatat Galleries. (All shows run through February 4 at Gallery Center, 608 Banyan Trl., Boca Raton. Call 561-995-7808.)
Lurie Fine Art Galleries in Boca Raton
Dear Matty,
Thanks for sharing your new work with me. While there are a few gaps in my recollections of all your efforts, i witnessed an evolution in your painting--a definite moving away from figural concerns to matters more spiritual., for lack of a better description. You are in the grasp of what Matta use to call "the great invisibles" I think, those charged gestural concerns that transcend the object "that is" to the impression of the object--that is perception beyond the substance. I no longer search for naturalistic images in these works; instead, I see something decidedly more transient and elusive.-another environment without rules or precepts one imagines to where "shapes"
and relations emerge-no true literal sensations here, instead subliminal ones steeped in personal phantasms. I don't know how Clement Greenberg would have responded, but I, for one, see your paintings searching beyond Surrealism and it manifestations in the Abstract Expressionism movement into ensembles that now go beyond your previous flirtations with erotica, the sensual and the sensuous. The works are visually intellectual without being self- conscious..........that's the best said about any abstraction that still has a foot in the realm of objectivity. The ambiguity ofyour work is its strength......the motives remain mysterious. And well the should, since automatism never goes out of fashion, especially when it is handled so well.
Matt Carone has been a fixture on the South Florida art scene for so long that it's easy to take him for granted. The New Jersey native opened his famous, influential gallery on Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale in 1959, and in the following decades, he built a roster that included such artists as Wolf Kahn, Leon Kroll, Wifredo Lam, and, of course, the great Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta. Meanwhile, Carone quietly continued his own work as a painter, urged on by Matta on his many visits to the area. And when the 41-year-old Hortt Memorial Competition was on the verge of going under a couple of years ago, Carone made his gallery available to the Broward Art Guild as one of the venues for the beleaguered exhibition. Last year, the artist sold his 10,000-square-foot space, which is now home to the Las Olas Art Center. But best of all, the 75-year-old Carone continues to paint, and if a recent one-man show at Lurie Fine Art Galleries in Boca Raton's Gallery Center is any indication, he's at the height of his creative powers.
The imaginary realm of Matthew Carone's painting is a place where traditional figures take on the manic presence of musicians, angels, and mythological heroes and beasts, while others give off the visionary auras of tribal shamans. Fielding a cast of characters from myth and reality, Carone takes on human frailty and beauty, topics many contemporary artists avoid.
Carone's work echoes with a wide range of modernist experiments. Not only is Carone identified with the pioneer generation of Abstract Expressionists, but also critics have seen affinities with Surrealism in his work, as well as developments parallel to those of the CoBrA group. Already enamored by the work of his brother, Nicholas Carone, he looked to such artists as Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning for inspiration. Matta, in particular, mentored his aspirations and gave him insight into how his work could develop.
Although Carone's canvases owe a debt to the history of Abstract Expressionism, it was not until his version of abstraction began to generate figures that the world of Carone's art became the challenging, trance-filled realm it is today. A long, intense struggle led him, at first, away from recognizable objects to spontaneous, non-figurative gesture, and then back again to the region inhabited by his flame-like personages. With this cast assembled, he offers a reflection on the world outside his art.
The innermost subject of Carone's art is the “human condition.” Yet, we cannot go directly to the heart of his painting. The physicality of the image stands in the way. So we have to talk about pigment on canvas.
We have to be formalists for a moment in order to get beyond formalism. All of the artist's characteristic strengths are here: color smoldering hot and transparently cool, rich textures, and an emotional tangle of line. His paintings have a restrained, though equally dynamic, balance of opposing forces: thinly painted areas versus thick impasto, hard edges versus irregular, broken contours, oppositions of intense hues, and all tendencies toward deep space constantly pulled back to the surface. The adjustments of opposites in the painting – closed form versus open line, clear definition versus ambiguity and, most significantly, chance versus deliberate manipulation – constitute the core of his art.
Carone is in charge of the image, yet he often takes the risk of letting it have its way with him. Such scenes reflect the courage of an artist so much at one with his art that he can laugh at the occasionally difficult moments in the relationship, those times when painting dictates to him, rather than the other way around. Confidence this solid unleashes extraordinary powers. Gusts of euphoria sweep through Carone's art, especially in the works of these last few years.
One senses in these works the strength a painter's gesture can have when he points without the least hesitation at the pleasures and terrors of an entire lifetime. Matthew Carone teaches us that, with courage, the pleasure wins out.
Renaissance: a reawakening? A period of time when the arts flourish, great art is produced, new insights develop. It happens in societies, it happens in individuals. Mathew Carone is in a second major career, a true renaissance artist. Today's painting reaffirms his inner talents as an artist, as a man reaching to the highest pinnacle, with fresh insights and great skill. He shows the viewer new visions.
As a youngster he quickly developed both notable musical and visual artistic quality. After marriage and children he became a school teacher. The salary was steady, furnishing a solid family footing, and allowing him the opportunity to continue both the violin and painting. Over the many decades of hands on involvement in the local cultural community, Mathew Carone became a major force in the artistic world of South Florida—a friend to artists and musicians of international distinction from all corners who subsequently came to live and work in Florida.
Although preferring to keep his paintings a source of private pleasure, over the years Matt has participated in many successful exhibitions, both in Florida and across the United States, and has been the recipient of numerous awards for excellence in the visual arts. His work has been enthusiastically received by many notable art critics and writers and he has been recognized by his peers as a notable force in the contemporary Florida art scene. Today, his work can be found in many prominent public and private collections.
I am privileged to have in my own small collection two Carone works. One is an early composition of strong color and sharp edges, the second a recent one with delicate shadings and fascinating linear structure. Both have had my admiration and the veneration of many others who have seen these images in my home.
This exhibition is further testimony to work that reflects the nature of a serious , knowledgeable artist who has mastered his craft. He has arrived at his renaissance, an acknowledgement of a mastery anew.
(Among his many professional awards and distinguished accomplishments in the visual arts, Mr. Freundlich is the Director Emeritus of the Lowe Art Museum at The University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, and Chair Emeritus of the Department of Art at Syracuse University, New York. He currently serves as President of the Richard Florsheim Art Foundation.)
We ask two things of an artist: that he invents a world of his own and that his world has some bearing on the one in which we live. The imaginary realm of Matthew Carone's painting is one of the most abundant riches in contemporary art. It is a place where some traditional figures take on the manic presence of musicians, angels, and mythogical heroes and beasts, while others give off the visionary auras of tribal shamans. In Carone's art, the male presence is, if anything, more vivid than the female. Each of his characters seems to be dedicated to one or another of his muses, who not only inspire his art, but also provide it with its grandest subject matter.
Fielding a cast of characters from myth and reality, Carone takes on human frailty and beauty, topics many contemporary artists avoid. At the same time, he shows another rare quality: a sense of humor. Thus, in a series of grand and witty gestures, he banishes ordinary beauty from his heroines. Yet, beauty persists in Carone's sensuous line and painterly textures. All the easily recognized sorts of nobility have fled his male archetypes, yet there is heroism to be found in the artist's largeness of vision and in the perseverance with which he has pursued it.
Carone's canvases owe a debt to the history of Abstract Expressionism, yet it was not until his version of abstraction began to generate figures that the world of his art became the challenging, trance-filled realm it is today. A long, intense struggle led him, at first away from recognizable objects to spontaneous, nonfigurative gesture, and then back again to the region inhabited by his flame-like personages. With this cast assembled, the artist found a way to fulfill that second demand we make of him. He offered a reflection on the world outside his art.
The question is what we make of that reflection. How, in other words, do we go about hearing what Carone has to say and seeing what he has to show us? The innermost subject of his art is the "human condition." Yet, we cannot go directly to the heart of his painting. The physicality of the image, its bodily presence, stands in the way. So we have to talk about pigment on canvas. We have to be formalists for a moment in order to get beyond formalism. All of the artist's characteristic strengths are here, color smoldering hot and transparently cool, rich textures, and an emotional tangle of line. And there is something more: a habit of style that reads first as a formal device and then, looking further, becomes powerfully expressive.
His play of hues keeps the eye in swift motion around the figure. Where his colors echo those of the background, the eye is drawn all the more strongly to the central vortex of the composition. Carone is forever reminding us of the similarity between aesthetic and sexual heat.
The artist handles formal considerations capably, yet the deep strength of his art does not lie here. Rather we only begin to understand him when we get a glimpse of the motives behind his color shifts. They activate the eye, but what does the painter mean by them? We can decipher the messages conveyed by line with relative ease. The figures in his compositions define themselves with a wiry suppleness of outline that is agitated and abashed all at once. Color resists language much more successfully, yet I think that one or two things about the background of his compositions can be put into words.
For one thing, the coloration of a figure's body, with all of its nuances of texture, finds an exact counterpart in the background hue. This makes it seem as though space is a function of the body that occupies it. The figure does not stand against a curtain of color so much as generate surrounding space from the vividness of its own presence. Figure and ground are separate in fact; in spirit, they are one.
Spontaneity is clearly visible in the uneven opacity of the paint that records the movement of the brush and in the occasional drips of paint. A tension is generated by the conflict between Carone's approach and traditional painting and drawing. Line, every now and again, models and defines edges and yet, in an ambiguous manner, loses touch with form. Color areas move back and forth so that spatial relationships are never clarified.
His paintings have a more restrained, though equally dynamic, balance of opposing forces: thinly painted areas versus thick impasto, hard edges versus irregular, broken contours, oppositions of intense hues and all tendencies toward deep space constantly pulled back to the surface. He sees the picture surface consciously as a responsive rather than an inert object, and painting itself as an affair of prodding and pushing, scoring and marking, rather than simply inscribing or covering.
Carone's paintings are occupied with breaking through the linear continuum by isolating forms of a shape that would repel each other, then relating them to a slightly felt scaffolding and an irrational meandering line. The adjustments of opposites in the painting, closed form versus open line, clear definition versus ambiguity, and most significantly, chance versus deliberate manipulation, constitute the core of his art.
It seems to me that all of Carone's paintings could be about experience. Each insists that meaning, no matter how all-inclusive, must come to us in a singular utterance. Consequently, none of the figures on view in this exhibition stands in a neutral space. Each comes alive in a place so peculiarly his or her own that even light and gravity read as signs of the figure's emotional state.
Carone's art is tempestuous. Sudden contrasts draw out attention to the prevailing weather, just as startling swoops into pictorial depths remind the eye that, after all, the action is on the surface. Figures are so vividly alive that they churn the surrounding atmosphere into glowing eddies. For all his complexity, Carone is direct, immediate, and this exhibition shows him getting more so by the year.
The artist's figures have so much energy that some of it is always available to convey the painter's own amazement at the willingness of formal qualities to turn into the flavors of emotion. Artists who encourage this transformation as adeptly as Carone usually end up labeled "Expressionists." This has certainly happened in his case. Not only is he identified with the pioneer generation of Abstract Expressionists, but critics also have seen affinities with Surrealism in his work, as well as developments parallel to those of the COBRA group. Yet it is not Expressionists alone who induce form to flair up into feeling. All artists do that, or make the attempt, and Carone's work echoes with a wide range of modernist experiment. Already enamored by the work of his brother, Nicholas Carone, he looked to such artists as Hans Hofman, Jackson Pollock, and William de Kooning for inspiration. Matta, in particular, mentored his aspirations and gave him insight into how his work could develop.
Matthew Carone takes full possession of such sources, as painters of his stature always do. His vision embeds each of his figures in a particular moment, a certain place. Time and space, body and gesture emerge from a dazzlingly specific play of color, texture, and line. The process is always a struggle, and the artist may never be able to subdue his painterly resources completely. Carone is in charge of the image, of course, yet he often takes the risk of letting it have its way with him. Such scenes reflect the courage of an artist so much at one with his art that he can laugh at the occasionally difficult moments in the relationship, those times when painting dictates to him, rather than the other way around. Confidence this solid unleashes extraordinary powers. Gusts of euphoria sweep through Carone's art, especially in the works of these last few years. One senses here the strength a painter's gesture can have when he points, without the least hesitation, at the pleasures and terrors of an entire lifetime. Matthew Carone teaches us that with courage, the pleasure wins out.
Art is when one and one make three. Drawing is when the magic begins—and sometimes ends. With a single stroke, light is separated from dark, and space and scale are evoked from a void. In the beginning of all the arts lies this graphic act by pen, pencil, brush, or chisel with which, and from which, all else follows. As line bends to follow form, the re-creation of nature can give the artist a god-like role, as if re-experiencing Genesis. That sudden, miraculous moment when art becomes illusion is never more vividly experienced then in these new canvases by Matthew Carone showing at the Cesarea Gallery
Carone's drawings are the bone and muscle of his art, the often fascinating and themselves eloquent preparatory solutions that underlie his finished ideas. His line can be playful, willful, or almost uncontrolled, as well as rigidly within his command and direction. The subjective quality of Carone's recent paintings recalls Montaigne's speculation about whether he played with his cat, or she with him. These paintings' great strength lie in their inference of light through dark, as he illuminates from within and without, his achievement verging on the mystical.
Carone's line has many lives. Enclosing form by containment, it can assume the precise, fixed character of a die cameo. As it is worked into the shape of its model, his line becomes a pliable means, like wrought iron or twisted wire, conforming to its object. His lines may break and scatter like waves over a rock, to define form with extraordinary proficiency in shifting cascades. He transforms his imagery into shimmering, almost impressionist linear stream-of-consciousness. Hundreds of short lines, like tadpoles or the dots and dashes of Morse code, wriggle or tap out his myriad, interlocking images in fluid magnetic currents or vectors. In other instances, he chooses a freer line that seems to define itself as it goes along, adding a unique spontaneity to the creative process.
Carone's placement of the forms in his composition is a major yet elusive aspect of his drawings in the complex relationship between what you see and what you don't, a subtle way of defining and animating the work of art. His lines endow the blank areas with a complementary life, assisting and extending the creative expression. Matthew Carone is a striking master of this art of intervals. Acquaintance with Surrealism may have contribuited to his audacious exploitation of, or the absence of, suggestive blank space, as well as presence for achieving linear and emotional resonance. In his sensitive, superbly controlled paintings, a single line can capture a linear landscape or a puzzled facial expression, vibrating like a stringed instrument.
His paintings' innate powers of suggestion and inference, their intriguing anticipation of elaborate presentations to come, provide perhaps the ideal medium for this most gifted of artists. Carone brings both new objectivity and new subjectivity to his work, as he presents his astonishing dreams with the persuasiveness of a documentary. His line and light and shade seem to emanate from his figures in a sort of metaphysical photography, as if a function of their very metabolism. No other contemporary artist possesses such a reciprocity between drawing and writing; with him the visual and the verbal are interchangeable, both equally oriented toward lasting discovery through description, keen analysis through observation.
Matthew Carone, in "hand-making" his new mirrors of actuality, is reasserting the continuing dominance of the painter-draughtsman, with his unique powers of intellect and choice, in reclaiming some of that visual realm temporarily captured by photography. Ultimately, Carone's art is the "trip" affirming his right to assert himself through exercise of his imagination. Allegory and fantasy in his work expand both vehicle and license for the expression of his individual validity as a sentient being, creating another tiny stitch in that greatest of all myths: the sense of time.
Letter written to Matthew Carone from Matta, after seeing his works at his studio in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, on January 11, 1997
I can't see how to write about drawings. A few lines about lines. Mainly, if the lines of the drawings are lines of forces. Now, how to see the real forces that are driving these lines. And again, how am I to know that the forces of the lines I shall write will mean what the lines of the drawings mean? Etc., etc., etc.—it is already a cast of lines. Next comes the play, and to see if it is a drama or a comedy, which the lines are playing for us. It is all there, in the artist's lines growing in search of us, and we shall give birth together, knowing that it is all about "US" vs. "IN" the artist!"
|
