Show Review

Art Review: Asterisk Gallery in Tremont
Thursday August 27, 2009

by About.com contributor, Ken Gradomski

What's the difference between Modern Art and Contemporary Art? Many think that there is no difference. Many others would strongly disagree claiming there certainly is a difference! To clarify, Contemporary Art is work created by living artists whereas the paradigm of Modernity and the production of Modern Art ended with the beginning of the Pop Art Movement in the 1950's. Contemporary work is actually difficult to find outside of the decorative paintings that usually inhabit most galleries whose only conc erns are for sales and income. Those are not bad concerns in themselves...

However, there is a place in Tremont that exists only for exhibition, that is to say,to present the different facets of contemporary work created by local and residential artists without regard to ornamental marketability. Dana Depew, owner of the Asterisk Gallery and artist himself, will tell you that ‘the value of the Gallery far exceeds the payment’...of keeping it open. He will also inform you that when he started it eight years ago it was to be a ‘strictly exhibition’ space unconcerned with income from sales.’ He said he wanted a place whereby the artistic community and the community in general ‘benefits from excellent work and synergy.’

Currently on display at the Asterisk Gallery, 2393 Professor Avenue are 24 works by Matthew Dibble in a show he has entitled, ‘Equipping the Shop for Action.’ His works have primal power, filled with strong lines and figures that are both allusive and symbolic. Informed by what presents as a Formalistic Neo-Synthetic Cubism, the paintings are large and linear, the drawings small, but captivating. Rest assured that that description falls far short of the pure impact and presence he creates with this selection of his newest work on display. He harbors an ongoing and subterranean passion that he infuses into his lyrical lines on both paper and canvas. Matthew has been creating Art for more than thirty years and his work hangs in both private and corporate collections.

Shown above is Dibble's five-foot-two inch by six foot painting entitled, ‘Guardians Against Cold.’ It is a representative depiction of his heroic iconography and, according to Matthew, his most favored piece. Online information is available on Asterisk Gallery's Web site Information from the artist, himself can be obtained on Matthew Dibble's site. His work at the Asterisk Gallery is waiting for you to visit.

Matthew Dibble works exhibited at two Cleveland galleries: Art Matters
by Steven Litt / Plain Dealer Art Critic
Wednesday August 19, 2009, 3:37 PM

Courtesy of Matthew Dibble- Artist Matthew Dibble made "Together With Moths" and other paintings in his new show at Asterisk Gallery by projecting photographs of small sketches onto a large canvas and then adding areas of color and drawings of objects such as the chair to create the final image.
Every artist plays a game in which he or she alone makes the rules. But what happens when the rules are so loose that anything goes?
That question is raised by two exhibitions of work by Lakewood artist Matthew Dibble, at Tregoning & Co. in Cleveland s Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood and at Asterisk Gallery in Tremont.
Dibble, 52, a native of Euclid who trained at the Cooper School of Art in Cleveland from 1975 to 1978, has oceans of energy and a great deal of visual intelligence.

But while filling yards of canvas, he has also veered in a variety of directions in ways not justified by quality in each case.
In the Tregoning show, Dibble is displaying three types of work from the past decade.
REVIEWS
Tregoning & Co. / Asterisk Gallery What: Two simultaneous exhibitions of work by Lakewood artist Matthew Dibble.
When: Through Wednesday, Sept. 30, at Tregoning; through Saturday, Sept. 5, at Asterisk.
Where: Tregoning: 1300 West 78th St., Cleveland; Asterisk: 2393 Profes sor St., Cleveland.
Admission: Free. Call 216-281-8626 for Tregoning or 330-304-8528 for Asterisk.
First, there are heavily painted but flaccid abstractions that weakly echo paintings by Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning. Second, there are several colorful and thinly painted abstractions that have a semi-Cubist look. Finally, there is a selection of large, cartoonish images of grotesque, imaginary creatures floating in shallow visual fields pressed close up against the picture plane.
As Dibble explains in an artists statement: These acts of painting helped me become more related to my inner world.
It s great that the paintings give Dibble satisfaction, but the lack of rigor, especially in the thickly painted abstractions, suggests that at times, the artist values quantity over quality.
The best paintings in the Tregoning show are the colorful, semi-Cubist images, in which the artist combines linear patterns with dryly brushed patches of color to create visual effects akin to stained glass. Unfortunately, these works are in the minority.
In the Asterisk show, Dibble is exhibiting 14 large canvases and 10 drawings in which he makes a definitive choice of direction: All the works are done in the artist s cartoolike mode, with bizarre, imaginary creatures lurking comically amid basement appliances such as a hot-water heater and a utility sink.
The pictures are constructed in a smart, efficient, no-nonsense way, with great economy of effort. They communicate Dibble’s main message, which is to suggest mental phantasms that seem to creep through the basement of the mind.
Here, though, Dibble’s work would be stronger if he could add clarity and finesse to his drawing, which tends to look rote and repetitive. His humanoid creatures have noses and eyes, but instead of hands or feet, they have flippers or stumps.
Could it be that fingers and toes are simply too hard to draw?
If Dibble toughened the rules of his game and truly focused on a direction that meant the most to him he might win greater satisfaction and a larger audience.

Together With Moths

BLUEPRINTS FOR A MYTHOS
Matt Dibble at Asterisk and Tregoning Galleries
by Douglas Max Utter

Matt Dibble's recent large oil-on-canvas paintings in Equipping the Shop for Action at Asterisk Gallery seem almost to flicker, like a cartoon flipbook caught between pages. This is odd because in most respects, they're as plain as paintings can be — line drawings in paint and charcoal firmly marked on brusque surfaces.
Dibble's muted, all-over taupes and grays are like the first uneven coat of a tasteful decorator shade on a living-room wall. Likewise, most of the objects he depicts against these sober color fields are as uninflected as he can make them: schematic charcoal outlines of furniture and utilitarian objects. An air compressor in a work titled "Building the Best Workbench" is probably the fanciest contraption shown, but mainly Dibble's barely indicated interiors (a curved line for an alcove, a vertical line for a corner) frame cement blocks, a couch, a chair, a furnace — and (whammo!) a bestiary of exotic composite monsters, also rendered in the same matter-of-fact linear style, but in dark oil paint. It's as if a minotaur's cousins and siblings floated, dream-like, into rooms that otherwise betray no imaginative dimension: Maybe Dibble's calm places — emptied of emotion or even affect — lure or conjure these weird creatures, like deep-sea fish nosing up against the glass of an aquarium.
As in many of Francis Bacon's paintings, geometric and architectural linear elements are used as a type of confining metaphysical space. In a Bacon painting, this dimension is stretched around too-solid flesh. But Dibble's figures aren't souls in torment or flesh tormented by incarnation. They're transparent and conjectural, like stick figures evolving under the pressure of an alien atmosphere. They also feel like sketches — of angels, demons — in the margins of a medieval manuscript, or like formulae for a necromancer's algebra of transformation. One thing is sure — we're looking at imagery levitated from the depths of the mind, asking questions about the thin air of our reality and the fluid strangeness of our own presence in the world. Who are these spirits, configured like masks or Celtic daydreams, with claws and carapaces and memories of ancient gods, but us — our true shapes compounded of our ancestors, flickering behind the ordinariness of daily things?
Dibble's work is also currently on view at Tregoning & Co. It's a mix of his current paintings with other, entirely abstract works completed since 2000. There's a touch of Cezanne here, a bit of Leger there and a fascination with material on its own terms, including construction-grade adhesive. Showing some of the breadth of Dibble's efforts and his consistency as he explores different ways to fill a pictorial rectangle with shapes and motion and a sense of soul, Tregoning's picks cast light on this extraordinary painter's over-all project. At once a materialist and a mystic, Dibble ranges through the history of painting and the physiological basis of the mind, remembering that all we know is eternally in flux.
arts@clevescene.com

Studio 2009

NEWS RELEASE
For immediate release
AUGUST 10, 2009




Solo Exhibition of New Work by Matthew Dibble Opens at Asterisk Gallery
CLEVELAND—August 10, 2009—On Friday, August 14th, Asterisk Gallery in Tremont will showcase recent figurative work from Cleveland artist Matthew Dibble in a solo exhibition consisting of ten drawings and fourteen paintings. The exhibition is titled “Equipping the Shop for Action,” and runs through September 5th. According to Dibble, the title is not to be taken literally, but is a metaphor for the psychological preparation he undertook before completing this series of work.

The paintings in this exhibit were inspired by an ongoing series of figurative pen-and-ink drawings that the artist has been producing since his days in art school. Commenting on the paintings, well-known artist and writer Douglas Max Utter said, “Like half-remembered myths, Dibble’s figures move as outlines across a patchwork ground of light and shade … 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.”
The drawings on display were selected by Christopher Pekoc, the 2007 Cleveland Arts Prize winner who also curated the first public exhibition of Dibble’s drawings in 2005. Pekoc explains, “In his drawings, Matt produces an elegant line drawn with a sure and sensitive hand. He fills these small worlds with mystery and beauty. I am attracted to them because of their uniqueness and originality, and also because I suspect that their source lies deep within the artist’s creative core.”
Pekoc will also participate as a panelist in an artists’ dialogue at the gallery on Saturday, August 15th at 3 pm, along with innovative neon artist Jeffry Chiplis, Utter, and Dibble.
Dibble’s work has been exhibited at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Tregoning & Company, and the Butler Institute of American Art, and resides in private and corporate collections.
Asterisk Gallery is located at 2393 Professor Ave. in the historic Tremont area of Cleveland. For more information, contact artist and gallery owner Dana Depew at 330-304-8528 or www.asteriskgallery.com. For more information on Matt Dibble, please visit www.dibblepaintings.com. “Equipping the Shop for Action” will be on view from August 14th through September 5th.