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Matthew DeIeget
CRESS GALLERY
752 Vine Street, UTC Fine Arts Center
October 9-December 7
"Pictures at an Exhibition, Matthew Deleget's current solo show,
features works made with common materialspainter's tape,
drywall screws, garbage bags, paint rollers, pushpins, and
spotlightswhich modulate walls, canvases, and pedestals to
variously delicate, violent, and playful effects, and turn the gallery
space into something of a construction zone. n the process,
Deleget casts painting as a site-sensitive practice that enlists an
expansive repertoire of gestures: wrapping, dipping, hammering,
pushing, screwing, floating, flooding, and throwing away.
Deleget mobilizes a restrained palettered, yellow, and blue;
black, white, and gray. Three large yet unmonumental works
anchor the main gallery. The entrance-facing wall is awash with
Color Vulture (all works 2012), in which three monochrome floor-to-ceiling projections (in red, yellow, and blue)
cast painting as event. A store-bought white rectangular canvas hangs hesitantly at the center of each pure-color
projection: a reticent star in the hot spot. But stardom is here unsustainable and color unstable. Color bounces off
the wall, sullying the edges of the neighboring canvases, while use unevenly and unpredictably fades the spots'
intensity. As one moves toward and along the work, one draws and redraws the canvases' borders. Their
shadows expand and retract uncontrollably on all sides. Viewers are left oscillating in a battleground between
control and contingency. Ultimately, Color Vulture is a metaevent: a play on the rectangle in the third power. t
also nods to Mondrian's 1926 essay "Home-Street-City.
One Thousand People Just like Me assaults a nearby wall with half-drilled-in screws, creating an immersive, if at
times nearly imperceptible, grid. As one traverses the space, shadows variously thicken the screws/strokes,
turning the work into a constellation of recombinant works-to-come. Across the room, Nuclear Error tenuously
blankets a wall with twenty-five black thirty-gallon garbage bags, hung gridlike with static electricity and a few
black pushpins. When push comes to shove, Deleget's tight show proves the infinite power of deft gesture.
Sylvie Fortin
View of "Pictures at an Exhibition," 2012.
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