Most often in my visual experience, I look but there is so much that I do not see. I look at a road but I don’t pay attention to the reflections and lights flashing across it; I look at a tree but I don’t notice the dappled light piercing through it; I glance at a building but I miss the softness of one wall in sunlight against another in shade. An abstract painting, a flat surface containing brushstrokes and colors, free from hard and direct real world associations and not anxious to communicate anything in particular, is a site for my visual attention to wander and concentrate on details that usually don’t matter—such as the subtleties of texture, shape, color, and light. An abstract painting is therefore an opportunity to uniquely re-engage and reflect on the incredible human capacity for visual perception and to find enjoyment in the richness of that experience.

 

I am making paintings as arenas of light and color for the purpose of this specific type of visual attention. The making process involves applying layers of oil paint onto anodized aluminum sheets, and then progressively scraping back the surface using metal tools—which leaves a variety of types of residue from previous layers, creating a complex, multilayered space of light, color, and texture. The act of painting is not the visualization of my thoughts but rather a mode of cognition in itself. Starting each painting in the absence of an idea, every color chosen and brushstroke applied prompts another in response, ultimately taking each painting in its own direction until a new picture emerges. The painting process thereby generates the idea. This improvisational approach creates inexhaustible possibilities from a finite range of material choices, resulting in a group of paintings that all share a common thread while each displaying a new expression of color, light, and structure. Such a fine-tuned balance of similarity and difference, of expectation and surprise, rewards the slow, attentive eye with a sustaining energy.

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Matt Herriot, 2024