“Dawn”
The Parsonage
Searsport, ME
May 3-June 22, 2025
“The owl of Minerva,” the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel once mused, “spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” I think of these words often when looking at the paintings of Matt Jones, whose images of owls, moths, nocturnal flowers, and fruiting fungi, suggest a crepuscular world stirring to life.
In this benighted moment, as the climate warms and democracy wanes, it would be understandable if Jones retreated further into the shadows in search of wisdom. And yet in his latest paintings we find instead that “morning has broken like the first morning,” in the words of the hymn popularized by Cat Stevens. Rays of Edenic sunshine stream through Jones’ canvases, sending wakeful eyeballs scuttling and alighting on balding pates with fresh inspiration.
A mystical energy pulses through these canvases, as if their unique images have been waiting to burst into reality. They have a hard-won immediacy, a rudimentary style born of deep study that reminds me of Philip Guston, whose own highly personal iconography erupted in scores of small, seemingly crude paintings. When an early critic took special aim at one of Guston’s works, calling the artist a “stumblebum,” Guston reacted with genuine surprise, reflecting “I thought I had put in everything I knew about painting.”
Jones has similarly poured his full knowledge of painting—including Guston’s—into these works, which mark the dawning of a new period in his life and work. They are created in the aftermath of his mother’s death, and a formative period from the birth of his first child Arah (A) to his second, Zelde (Z). The new alphabet embodied in these works tellingly numbers eighteen, the numerical value of the word chai, or life, in Hebrew.
The Parsonage is proud to exhibit these works in the historic lands of the Wabanaki, the People of the Dawnland.
Matt Jones
“In Advance of a Visit”
studio e
Seattle, WA
June 1—29, 2024
link: June 8th, 2024 artist talk
studio e is proud to present In Advance of a Visit, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by New York-based artist Matt Jones, his first with the gallery.
“The works in In Advance of a Visit energize the mythical (medieval illumination, dream visions, folklore) through attention to the local (old-growth forests, landscape architecture, and communal gardens in Northern Manhattan). An eye hovers in the background, as the poet’s face becomes a landscape, and bats become butterflies, butterfly wings, eyes, windows, the pages of a book. Long since extinguished candles nest under heavy clouds in a Prussian blue sky, the idea of their light lingering, where a broken wrought-iron fence wilts like a flower at the edge of the canvas. The candles are less domestic objects than arboreal entities. The tree stumps are antediluvian beings, their rings expressions of an entire life pulsing against the edge of the pictorial frame. The tree stumps, rooted in thought-feelings of climate catastrophe, erode the art historical assumption of the human subject (and the borders and binaries engendered by it), tendering the possibility of multiple simultaneous perspectives. Recurring symbols are correlated into a dynamic narrative experience. The paintings invite the viewer into each pictorial moment through perspectival instability, narrative ambiguity, and the urgency of the paint handling. There is the promise of story, and yet, the story is not predetermined, it is contingent and alive to the viewer’s presence.”
Jones has had many one or two person shows including Galerie Jerome Pauchant (Paris), Freight + Volume Gallery (New York), Horton Gallery (Berlin), Castor Gallery (New York), The Richard Massey Foundation (New York), and Bleecker Street Art Club (New York. He has participated multiple art fairs including NADA Miami (The Hole, New York), Spring Break Art Fair (Old School, Brooklyn), Miami Project (Driscoll Babcock, New York) and a solo presentation at Art Brussels (Bodson Gallery, Brussels). His work has been displayed in numerous group shows including Robert Miller (New York), Soy Capitán (Berlin), Olympia (New York), Anonymous (Mexico City & New York), Driscoll Babcock Gallery (New York), ADA Gallery (Richmond, VA), Dorfman Projects (New York), Tibet House (New York), The Varsity (Brooklyn), Galleri Geo (Bergan, Norway), Grey East (East Hampton, NY), The Artbridge Drawing Room (New York), Gildar Gallery (Beverly Hills, CA), Fiebach Minninger (Cologne), Exit Art (New York), and The Hole (New York). He has done performances at Essex Flowers (New York), Anonymous (New York), Artist Space (New York), and Creative Time (New York).
Jones attended the Yale University School of Art Summer School of Painting—Norfolk on an Ellen Battell Stoeckel Grant (2001), earned a BFA from Cooper Union (2002), and received an MFA at Hunter College (2021). In 2007 he founded Puppy American, a small independent press which publishes artist books, zines, poetry, and organizes exhibitions, focusing on collaboration. He lives and works in New York City with his partner, young child, and greyhound.