Matt Jones - Planetary (at Bleecker Street Arts Club)

Brooklyn artist Matt Jones has an all acrylics on canvas show running for the rest of the summer, and it does an effective job of conveying a lot of unnerving things about deep outer space and the native weirdness of our own chunk of space.

The paintings represent the enormity of outer space in a way that conveys its vastness in a unique sense--an enormity that creeps, a creeping enormity, a vastness that is sentient. That is the most unsettling thing about space--not its vastness, but the idea that there's some logic to it that has nothing to do with us. The images and use of color suggest menace, but unconscious menace. We aren't frightened of large earthly vistas really--we respect their scope and grandeur, but don't feel disquieted. Space is far more vast, but this isn't why its eerie--its vastness seems alive, and our idea of vastness usually goes together with dumbness, blankness. Seeing some kind of operative logic, or even suggestion of it, on such a vast scale, is unnerving.

Some of the pieces are more geological than cosmological or galactic, and they convey a similar sense of swirling chaos, but with more familiar, less alien colors and patterns.

 

 

 

There are two interesting pieces continuing the swirlingly chaotic theme, but in a somehow simpler, more peaceful aspect:

The neon vitality of the piece suggests a solar burst--this is the sun, or any star, or any formative energy concentration, which act as the catalyst for all of the universe. Sun, heat, simplicity--stars are the root of it all, but are somehow innocent in their patterns and unforbidding. Simplicity and innocence begetting complexity and terror.