Louisa Matthiasdottir
Harriet Zinnes
In the catalogue essay by Lance Esplund of the exhibition of Louisa Mattiasdottir
at the Salander-O’Reilly Gallery in New York City (through April 26, 2003)
we are told that the artist usually painted her landscapes by memory. It is not
always the method of artists, and yet Matthiasdottir is studiously adhering to
a rigorous objectivity despite the mysterious painterly results.What is also
remarkable is that the artist,who is from Iceland, a place that she left in her
twenties to come to live in America, did not remove the Icelandic landscapes
from her aesthetic vision. How clear are her sheep, her cucumbers and eggplants
and the special light of Iceland, the distances without buildings. Reykjavik
retains its immediacy in her work. The geometric abstraction, the almost sanitized
clarity of, for example, Sheep by Water, Dark Mountain or Still Life with Wine
Jug, Eggplant and Red Peppers suggest an artist whose eye embraces a reality
founded on an aesthetic hard won by a postmodernism that never denies tradition.
When the artist
paints her views of Paris, to this viewer Paris becomes more Reykjavik. Perhaps
it is the geometric Mondrian influence or the inability of the artist to remove
Iceland from her memories. Her Paris Bridges with Two Figures, for example, though
painted in the late 70s seems more to reflect a walk in the country than a Parisian
promenade. Her abstractions are not the abstractions of the Cubists. They are
more chaste, and as the rich colors of her canvases give enormous pleasure to
a viewer, they bring to mind an ordered universe where what is out there has
a distinct direction, a usefulness that the unviolated, the regular living of
the bourgeois abundantly dictates.
It is interesting that this artist so keenly observant of the world around her
should paint self-portraits, and I assume many of them. In this exhibition one
wall holds only self-portraits, each distinctive, with the artist’s usual
chiseled clarity. In Self-Portrait with Dark Coat, the artist stands with gray,
blue and green rectangles as ground holding an umbrella, impervious, watchful,
accepting whatever will follow. Here I am, says the artist or so it would seem.
Look at my work. It will make you accept the figures and forms of this world
with just a little bit more color, a little bit more formality, because of my
wielding of the brush.
