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.

 

Abstract paintings, to me, are about seeing clearly. This may sound strange given the tendency to view an abstract painting as a simplified or imprecise representation, as if you could just put on your glasses and recognize what the scene is supposed to be. And no wonder—the term abstract implies an extraction or removal of something, involving a distancing from the original source. However, if you consider an abstract painting as nothing but brushstrokes and colors, then it doesn’t necessarily conjure the appearance of something else that is out there somewhere. It simply offers an immediate experience of whatever you see in front of you in real time, whether that’s a mark, scuff, line, or two colors blending together. An abstract painting is, in other words, a picture of itself. 

 

Carefully shifting your gaze across an abstract painting’s surface could remind you of the simple pleasures found in color, light, texture, and depth. This act of observing a painting is related to, though independent from, observation of light in nature—a correspondence that may not be immediately apparent when looking at vibrant, commercial pigments, such as cadmium yellow or ultramarine blue. Yet, while an abstract painting may not make you see or imagine an aspect of nature, there is an equivalence between the types of things you may notice in both cases: relative softness or harshness, warmer versus cooler hues, scattered fragments of light versus hazy modulations in tone. Experiences of abstract paintings as well as that of natural beauty both involve paying attention to the way something is rather than what it is. 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