Matthew Dennison, “Memory Field”

by Matthew Kangas

Fountainhead Gallery, Seattle, Washington

Continuing through March 28, 2026

Matthew Dennison, “Augrest Vestal,” 2025, oil on canvas, 48 x 48”. All images courtesy of Fountainhead Gallery, Seattle.

Largely self-taught after a brief stint at the Portland Museum Art School, Matthew Dennison has carved out his own civilization of peculiar people. Set in hemmed-in indoor-outdoor spaces, Dennison’s scenes are deeply subjective conceptions free of anecdote, even as they allude obliquely alluding to his narrative painting of previous years.

It’s tempting to contextualize Dennison into a folk-art or outsider art niche, especially since many of his paintings are framed by found recycled doorways or humble painted architectural moldings. As we gaze into these container frames, we encounter another world equally ambiguous, both in narrative, site, and, more significantly of late, gender. While the artist’s early works were representational and figurative, for example of swimmers and animals, the current work creates its own race of androgynous beings, neither male nor female. They are shorn of hair and grouped in embracing pairs, neither siblings nor parent-child dyads. As a result, their appeal is dependent upon our own ability to sympathetically absorb the artist’s constructions of unfamiliar people. Without reference to race, poverty or other social issues, so common in figurative art today, Dennison’s canvases — painted with his hands in gloves instead of with brushes — declare their individuality through their sheer hermetic qualities: who or what is going on here?

Matthew Dennison, “The Sound,” 2026, oil on canvas, 24 X 24”.

The twelve pictures on exhibit vary in size from two to four feet. Since the imagery is continuous from scene to scene, their scale does not matter much. The larger ones do take on a more public tone, daring us to participate in the drama of the characters, who are always straight-faced, never staring at one another or out at the viewer but preoccupied by their glances beyond the frame’s edge. For example, “Augustea” initially seems to depict a woman and child but, look again, and it’s a small adult. Two other figures inhabit “Memoric Field,” and yet more pairs occupy floating space in the largest work, “Augrest Vestal.” “Scientist” hints at the folly of scientific certainty in an age that challenges its authority, while “Zolly Dother” puts someone in a bright pink dress who could be in drag or be transgender.

Matthew Dennison, “Thust Cloudeo,” 2026, frame on, oil on panel, 29 x 17”.

Highly prolific, Dennison has had annual shows of his work throughout the Northwest and across the Southwest and Midwest since the 1990s. Dennison’s reputation extends well beyond the clubby wrap-around comfort of Portland. In lieu of a well-deserved museum retrospective, it’s difficult to speculate on the growth or evolution that brings him to the current works. Widely written about in journals from his native region to Maine and Iowa, and included in institutional collections in Kansas and Michigan, it could be that Dennison’s art is geographically misplaced in the Northwest.

That leads to the impression that he is better linked to a group of artists he has hinted at admiring, the American Magic Realists of the 1940s. Besides Jared French, Paul Cadmus, and Ivan Albright there is, more pertinently, George Tooker. The latter’s blank-faced staring figures are trapped on subway station platforms, in closets, and in confining chapel-like alcoves that prohibit interaction but bind individuals together into socially disparate crowds. I regard Dennison as an unknown, unacknowledged descendant of those Magic Realists. Unlike him, they were all obsessed with the crisp designs of Renaissance art, but nonetheless they have served as the closest antecedents for this Portland outsider artist more than half a century later.

Matthew Dennison, “Bethed Core,” 2025, oil on canvas, 48 x 48”.

With such a persistent, not to say resistant, uncertainty of meaning, the ambiguity of Dennison’s aesthetic was underscored by the artist in an interview when he noted, “I like the sense of mystery … what is going to happen next? There is a little bit of the unknown and I always want to know what the next thing is. I think that is kind of what my work is about.” Narrative anticipation rather than the usual pleasures of the eye is what drives interest in Dennison’s work.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.