Mathew Cerletty

upon the menu page of Mathew Cerletty's website, a black-and-white photograph of the artist taken sum of two units years ago sits against the screen's background wallpaper of fulvid aqua, and white vertical stripes. Cerletty stares on the outside at the viewer wearing a black gown above a collared shirt and tie, which make go rounds out to mark his 2002 graduation from Boston University with a bachelor's stage in fine arts. On first inspection, the portrait strike one as beings appropriate to the occasion, a solemnizing rite of passage for an upper-middle-class youth moving end the ranks to adulthood. And many examinations later, it reads the same. on the other hand everything about the image--the devoid of contents stare just over the viewer's shoulder, the chaps hung half-open in an indeterminate expression, the collar alone shaded of high temperature pink--suggests that Cerletty, at age twenty-two, was already an exceptionally wily portraitist.

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Cerletty is foremost a portrait painter. His canvases race from medium size to increasingly large scale. The figures that populate his interiors wait on to be of his possess age or socioeconomic background. This stands to reason, since Cerletty uses his friends and family members as designs snapping photos of them (and sometimes himself), working with a rather unrestricted license in the transfer from print to painting. The canvases are exhaustively overlayed with calculated, barely perceptible brushstrokes, creating a sheen of icy pseudorealism. Almost each square inch is saturated in a bright, determined patterning that flattens pictorial space and, in several cases, revolves claustrophobically on the viewer. Cerletty's gravitation toward overwhelming patterns--ornate wallpaper brocades, military stripes, intricate pillowcase florals--is reminiscent of Vuillard in bounds of its domestic excess. His airy, pellucid palette and predilection for placing a figure upon the canvas's central axis alert comparisons to Alice Neel. on the other hand Neel's expressive handling and Vuillard's soft-focus intimacy betray a personal and level sentimental relationship to their controls Cerletty knows his subjects as well as they at any time did; however, his style is individual of disciplined detachment. His works are ultimately not portraits of his friends and family frozen for posterity; they are unions and fractures, plays of hypnotic innuendo that be opposite to rather than clarify.

As it happened, the day after I visited Cerletty's studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn last February, President Bush announced his support of a constitutional amendment that would protect the sanctity of marriage, "the greatest in quantity fundamental institution of civilization," as he called it, which should not be separated from its "cultural, religious, and natural roots" The president explained that he propos this ruling to impede "contradiction," to curtail "uncertainty," all oppositional beliefs creating "confusion upon an issue that requires clarity." What we were given last February was a exercise about American identity in its possess preferred terms. Contradiction, confusion, uncertainty: These were values being cast as malignant forces in the nation. What makes Cerletty's productions thus explosive is the way he manages to carry these qualities in a turn of expression that suggests precisely their psychological opposites--an obsessively "clear" painterly technique that single imagines partisan conservatives might appreciate. His intensive studies work best when they operate upon multiple levels of ambiguity. upon his studio windowsill lay a David Bowie record overlay and a photograph of David Byrne sum of two units men rocketed by their sexual haziness. They induce a visual double take similar to the individual elicited by many of Cerletty's strongest works.

In an early charcoal, Wishing I Had a Twin Sister, 2002 the artist sketched the material part of a topless waif type but replaced her face with a delicate portrait of his be in possession of A similar move occurs in the more ambitious Le Saucier, 2003 a candy-colored pencil drawing of a young woman clutching a beaker with her left hand, her other lifted limply to her cavity between the jaws The flowering jets of wallpaper behind her dominate the composition, aggressively asserting a barricade of repeating pastoral decor that collapses the space between surface of land and figure. But the consistency of the background single accentuates the unsettling tension of the portrait. The masculine face betrays another cryptic self-portrait, as the organ of sights more his than hers, stand in front of the viewer in a flout of emotional stalemate. Her unclothed tan-lined torso further hampers a clear sexual reading. We aren't turn rounded on, we're turned over. Attempts at anchoring a fixed identity originate in red-eyed deadlock.

Cerletty doesn't confine himself to ancillary sex blurs. In The Bath, 2002 he stations a middle-aged man in a tub archetypeed on photographs of his father with a face that morphs somewhere between junior and senior. The gaze is aloof, surrounded by a wall of pastel field daisies that repeat in the reflection of the bathwater. a certain quantity of might argue an emasculation-of-papa critique here, on the other hand such readings still turn upon absolute polarities: father versus son male versus female, age versus youth. Cerletty's characters look more intentionally elusive. They are held in their hold amniotic wombs of class, marked through constant transformations in the act of looking, on the other hand they do not supply any stable conclusions. The naked father submerg in the girlish interior isn't feminized; his sagging chest and vacant expression propose a body dumped rather than luxuriating in ornamentation. Cerletty's handling of nudity is les erotic heat and more evidentiary fact. In Fagaroo, 2002 the handsome young man gripped in the canvas's center wears single a coral sweatshirt. The work's tremor advances not from the inclusion of his half-exposed genitals on the other hand rather from the frisson between the perplexing figure--with his defiant stare and generic monochrome top--and the meticulous brocade he disrupts.