On and Off the Grid: In Conversation with Joanne Mattera
By Julie Karabenick
Joanne Mattera, Uttar 238, Encaustic on panel, 36 x 36?, 2004. Courtesy of Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
Joanne Mattera is an abstract artist who has been painting for over 30 years. She is the author of "The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax" (Watson-Guptill, 2001). Mattera exhibits regularly throughout the United States and abroad, and divides her time between Salem, Massachusetts and Manhattan.
Julie Karabenick: You’ve described your work as lush minimalism.
Joanne Mattera: My paintings are succulent in color and surface, but reductive in image and mark. I’m being a bit flip, but the term lush minimalism addresses the tension between the simplicity of my imagery and the sensuousness of my medium. This tension has kept me mining the same field for as long as I’ve been painting.
JK: So you consider your work minimalist in form and structure?
JM: Yes. The grid is the conceptual underpinning of my painting. Over or around or despite its structure, I work with a simple geometric vocabulary of dot, stripe, or block that I organize into stacks or orderly groupings. The grid is more than a device for me; it’s a referent, a touchstone, maybe even something of a muse. I came to the grid early in my career and have worked with it ever since, sometimes remaining scrupulously within its constraints and sometimes breaking out so far that its influence may be apparent to no one but myself.
JK: Have any particular visual referents inspired these choices?
JM: My geometry comes from within. I feel as if geometric abstraction is my native language. I’ve been involved with geometric abstraction for so long that any reference at this point is pretty much to my own body of work.
JK: Yet your work rarely feels spare or austere, quite the opposite.
JM: While my work is grid-based, reductive and repetitive, it’s too material, too sumptuous to be truly minimalist. The "lush" element comes courtesy of my medium: encaustic. With encaustic paint, pigment is suspended in wax rather than oil or acrylic polymer. Wax has a substantiveness that the other mediums just don’t have. Plus, it’s translucent, so it’s extraordinarily luminous.
JK: And you reveal the artist’s hand and evidence of process.
JM: Oh, yes. Process is very much a part of my approach to painting. And encaustic, with its melting and fusing, is very much a process-intensive medium. For example, the drips and irregularities are deliberate, providing a break in the tension of the grid. And I do a lot of layering and scraping. I approached painting the same way when I worked in oil, but wax is more acquiescent to my process. With wax I can selectively bring previous layers to the surface. More important, it’s my way of making a painting that is compelling on its own terms, not simply because the wax itself is so beautiful.
JK: And you obviously revel in color; no minimalist sensibility here.
JM: The interaction of hues is maximalist. I’m interested in the experience of color: the way hues interact when they abut, slide under, or slip over one another and the way the retina is piqued by this interaction. My current and ongoing series, Uttar, is inspired by the brilliant palette of miniatures from Mughal India and the small, refulgent paintings of Renaissance Siena.
JK: A reviewer said that you use grids the way classical poets used rigorous rhyme schemes: to impose elegant order onto an otherwise messy outpouring of emotion. Any truth to this?
JM: Well, I loved that the reviewer was connecting my grid to Sixties’ minimalism, and I appreciated his description of my work as &"elegant order" but I can’t say there’s a whole lot of "messy outpouring of emotion" in my work. Of wax, yes, because it can be an untidy medium, but I’m working out of a pretty centered place. To be honest, I think I gravitated to geometric abstraction, and specifically to an orderly imposition of geometric elements, because it was, and remains, the most expedient means of working with color, although after all these years, the color and the geometry have intertwined in a way that would be impossible for me to pry apart. Not that I’d want to.
JK: Your work is quite sumptuous. Is beauty an important concern?
JM: The issue for me is not "Is a work beautiful", but "Does it touch me viscerally, intellectually, visually, spiritually?" It’s rare that I experience "beauty" on each of those levels simultaneously, but it does happen with Giotto, with Sienese paintings, with Agnes Martin paintings and Martin Puryear sculptures, with the most visually reductive Amish quilts, and with much of Buddhist art, to offer a few examples. There’s an ineffable quality; some work has it, some doesn’t. I do know that if I’m feeling visceral and spiritual when I’m making my work, there’s a good chance you’ll sense it too.
JK: To what extent to you plan your work in advance?
JM: I begin each new painting with a loosely selected palette and a specific geometric element. Beyond that, there is no direct plan. My method is to repeat the chosen element, stack it, crowd it, layer it into a dense but orderly aggregate. As a painter, I operate more from impulse than from an analytical place. But because I work in series, there’s a certain logic as to how each new work moves the series forward.
JK: Turning to your medium, are there particular challenges to working in encaustic?
JM: Painting in this notoriously difficult medium requires a pinpoint of concentration, a moment in which all action is brought to bear on the act of making one brushstroke, one mark. After 15 years I’ve learned how to handle it. The biggest challenge is that the wax goes from liquid to solid in moments, so each brushstroke needs to be made decisively and quickly, lest the brush become stuck to the surface. Even with a fully charged brush, it’s all but impossible to make an extended swipe of color.
JK: So corrections or reworking are difficult?
JM: Making that extended swipe of color is difficult, but reworking smaller, discrete sections of a painting is not. I can scrape away what I don’t want, and by reapplying heat I can remelt the wax. There is, of course, the possibility that I’ll go too far and melt it into oblivion. Anyone who has taken a painting, in whatever medium, past the point of no return, will understand this.
JK: What excites you about encaustic?
JM: Wax gives me a range of translucency, from virtually transparent to truly opaque. I can build up color visually, layer upon layer, as well as by combining pigments on the palette. The surface is rich and the color is luminous, but you can literally look into the painting, and I do want you to do just that.
JK: Does the use of encaustic limit the scale of your work?
JM:I do feel somewhat bound because it’s so difficult to sustain a brushstroke across a wide surface. Painters who use an accretion of smaller brushstrokes are less likely to have this problem. Also, I work flat most of the time, so I’m limited by my reach. To work larger than about 48" x 48", I need to work modularly.
JK: Encaustic seems to have gained in popularity in recent years. To what would you attribute this?
JM: The luminosity of encaustic appeals to our contemporary sensibility, because virtually everyone now looking at art has grown up with luminous images, from the movie screen to the illuminated pixels of TV and computer screens. Practically speaking, the Internet has allowed artists to find material sources and to connect with one another.
Ultimately, though, it would be a mistake to think of encaustic as something exotic. It’s paint. And whatever the medium, ultimately, a painting has to speak for itself.
