Skins of Light

Skins of Light: An Appreciation
Matt Dibble on display at Tregoning & Company
By Douglas Max Utter

Like half-remembered myths Matt Dibble’s figures move as outlines across a patchwork ground of light and shade, color and pattern. In his painting Light Wounds of Early Youth, the half- inch dark brown line that defines the figure moves fluidly over a mottled background of pale pastel colors. This flat, uninflected stroke might be used to render a geometric shape in another sort of painting, and here it retains something of that formal, expository quality: it seems as if the figure depicted is a theorem, as much or more than a person. Perhaps each of these characters in recent paintings like Facing Down Giants, Missing Rungs, and Break Ornaments, Spill Food, is a constellation of a sort, a depiction of the imaginary lines that tenuously connect distant explosions of experience, seen or sensed in a painting long after the fact.
For most of the past three decades Dibble has been known mainly as a painter of expressive abstract works that emphasize the physical qualities of the painted surface. These often very active, crowded compositions seem to enact collisions between figure and ground, As with the ambitious, emotive physicality of paintings by Willem De Kooning or Jackson Pollock from the early 1950’s, Dibble’s works of this type are agons, battles between the artist’s dynamic gesture and the limits of the various surfaces (panel, canvas, etc.) he chooses; on the sidelines we also can sense the usual spectators: the idea of literal depiction, and traces of the self. His Quarry (2005), for instance, which deliberately echoes the dimensions and energies of DeKooning’s seminal Excavation (1950), is an account of violence, but also of concealment. DeKooning’s shattered fragments seem to represent the half-buried carnage of the Second World War, while the paper bag-brown rectilinear shapes that cobble over Dibble’s space might be seen to resemble the iconic hooded prisoner at Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
The source of Dibble’s figurative paintings is an ongoing series of small, lithe ink drawings. As fluid as calligraphy, they are at once the opposite of his tumultuous abstractions, and their complement. While his non-representational works explore as wide a range as possible of the visual incidents that chemistry and gesture can generate, Dibble’s drawings are in equal measure restrained. And yet the paintings which are exact enlargements of these quiet graphic interludes seem like a more sober articulation of the same visceral strain and drama. Limpid in their quietness and crisp, these drawn works are examples of transformation, cutting and pruning the human figure and the space in which it is embedded with sharp triangular sections, like thorns.
In Light Wounds of Early Youth the nude male figure is located, just barely, in interior space. He leans with a distorted limb against a yellow plane, which seems to be part of a room, or the thought of a room. If before leaning the limb was an arm, it has changed; it flattens out at the end and has an armored, spiked appearance. The artist has caught this personage in mid-metamorphosis, as if he were a Celtic selkie just returned from the sea. His stocky, amphibian legs stand on rectangular, toe-less feet, and the room itself is insubstantial with its oddly rounded flor and thinly applied paint, like an hallucination. An even less structured ground flickers within the breast of the creature ; it is tempting to associate the title with this flickering: here are transcendent wounds of light, as well as superficial bodily or emotional injuries -- the sort of marks that Jacob might have received as he wrestled with the angel.
There is often also a sly sense of humor about Dibble’s paintings. In Light Wounds the figure’s stately, almost sculptural head has been placed upside down on his stocky neck, as if he had hastily reassembled himself and got that part completely wrong. Or it could be that he’s just fooling around, enjoying a newfound freedom of posture. There is, really, nothing very definite about him. The few strokes that depict his genitalia are perfunctory and cherubic. He stands balanced on his right leg, with his foot turned inward, like a bashful boy. The curved green floor at his feet and the square, deep blue window behind his left elbow don’t confine his transformation, but frame it. In such paintings Dibble gives us quick maps of meditative states of mind. A graceful torsion bends the figure in Facing Down Giants, for instance. Like Dibble’s other personae, he is cast in a heroic mold, with an exaggeratedly athletic torso. His small head faces skyward and he sits on the ground, as if in a yoga posture, awkwardly graceful and content. Dibble’s spiritual beings are part hero, part clown, tumbling in a world that is no more than a back-drop for their antics. They are perhaps like skins of light, shed in the process of personal change.