fri 29/03/2024

Charles Matton: Enclosures, All Visual Arts | reviews, news & interviews

Charles Matton: Enclosures, All Visual Arts

Charles Matton: Enclosures, All Visual Arts

Miniature rooms ask oversize questions of space and beauty

'Francis Bacon's Studio' by Charles MattonAll Visual Arts

There is nothing new, nor inherently artistic, about making miniature models. Otherwise everyone who's ever stuffed a small ship into a glass bottle would be in the National Gallery. (Yes, Yinka Shonibare's fourth plinth ship-in-a-bottle outside the National Gallery is different.) But the boîtes (boxes/enclosures) of Charles Matton are of a different order entirely: recreations of artists' studios, imaginings of authors' libraries, tiny real rooms and tiny fake rooms. As well as the craft and the beauty, they challenge our very idea of seeing, space, reality.

There is nothing new, nor inherently artistic, about making miniature models. Otherwise everyone who's ever stuffed a small ship into a glass bottle would be in the National Gallery. (Yes, Yinka Shonibare's fourth plinth ship-in-a-bottle outside the National Gallery is different.) But the boîtes (boxes/enclosures) of Charles Matton are of a different order entirely: recreations of artists' studios, imaginings of authors' libraries, tiny real rooms and tiny fake rooms. As well as the craft and the beauty, they challenge our very idea of seeing, space, reality.

The only presence, since humans are rare in Matton's work, is absence, if that's not too pretentious

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While obsessively fascinating, these boxes owe much to Joseph Cornell and Susan Sontag's pioneering recognition . . . . THE APP on javari http://javari.com New York NY

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