Matthew Bourbon, “Where Sameness and Difference Meet”

by John Zotos

Kirk Hopper Fine Art, Dallas, Texas

Exhibition continues through September 7, 2024 August 24, 2024

Matthew Bourbon, “Promises of Satisfaction,” 2024, acrylic, mixed media on canvas, 20 x 16”

The thirteen new paintings that comprise Matthew Bourbon’s exhibition “Where Sameness and Difference Meet” were built upon an aesthetic edifice of unclassifiable abstract painting. Bourbon has made the practice of painting a tool for looking inwards, in the manner of a meditation, but with an eye toward interrogating what makes things different from each other, and conversely how are they alike. The images present a flat space, lacking depth but sometimes layered. Objects and forms are treated with no attempt to render volume. Each work was executed in acrylic and mixed media on canvas.

Matthew Bourbon, “Disappearing by Increments,” 2023, acrylic, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 64”

In several pieces an irregularly defined mass of shapes, lines, and abstract forms are set within, sometimes engulfed, by a substrate of color that functions as a ground. They can be seen as cellular structures competing with outside elements, as in “Promises of Satisfaction,” where the mass is bounded by dark lines that surround a host of shapes presented in varying colors. The mass of forms takes up the lower part of the canvas, in a tense standoff with a cloudy green substrate with which it visually competes. 

Matthew Bourbon, “Abandoned Memoir,” 2024, acrylic, mixed media on canvas, 20 x 16”

In “Disappearing by Increments” that competition continues. A mass of lines within a primarily black form is reduced from above. Within a gray space the mass is eroded, leaving a scalloped top portion with a green mass of paint as evidence of an erosive process.  For the substrate sections, the artist handles the paint with bold gestures, assuring that the materiality of the image quickly makes itself known.

Matthew Bourbon, “Contradiction Object,” 2024, acrylic, mixed media on canvas, 32 x 28”

Cellular metaphors aside, what’s at stake could also be traces of ruminations in which memory, ideas, or logical truths are cast away or erased altogether. We see this process at work in “Abandoned Memoir,” where the mass of lines takes up most of the canvas within a light sienna ground. Multicolored lines enter the frame in the horizontal register that aggressively puncture the mass from all sides, undermining its integrity as a memoir, leading it toward a new reality where difference reigns. Conversely, the similarly composed “Contradiction Object” presents the mass of lines and shapes as resistant to those linear projections, which in this image fail to penetrate the exterior membrane, unless of course the target is really floating in a layer above them.   

Matthew Bourbon, “Bruised Philosopher,” 2022, acrylic, mixed media on canvas, 46 x 36”

In the near monochromatic “Bruised Philosopher” a sea of gray brushstrokes form the background over which a much darker form resides in the center of the horizontal canvas. Faintly visible within the form are short lines in various colors among which blue stands out; they share the space with white orbs. A series of distinctly faceted and linked blocks that read as a protective shell surrounds the entire mass. This thick-skinned philosopher may be on his last legs, or just as possibly is in the middle of a process that reorganizes and revitalizes his internal structure. 

The ambiguous nature of reality, or our perception of it, lying at the core of this body of work suggests that the ability of painting to convey meaning is limitless.   

John Zotos is an art critic and essayist based in Dallas.