Matt Dibble’s fast-paced abstract paintings, displayed this past month at Arts Collinwood Gallery in an exhibit titled “Hope for the Picture Guild,” are all about the precarious thrill of physical movement through space, and the dissolution of form that flickers at the edge of vision. Curated by University of Akron professor Del Ray Loven, the exhibit concentrates on recent works by Dibble that take the action-packed gestural repertoire of 1950’s Abstract Expressionism as their point of departure. Willem DeKooning’s virtuoso deconstructed landscapes are the main precursors of Dibble’s works here, and Hans Hoffman’s influential experiments in visual layering, but the similarities can be misleading. The moves look much the same, but add up to a more introspective vision -- one that is still painterly, yet gives a postmodern account of randomness. Dibble’s hard-working manner and often unpretentious scale emphasizes the perspiration part of painterly genius. At the same time, this is a show notable for its profoundly quiet intelligence, grounded in the background noise of visual commonplaces. Far from merely revisiting an older style, Dibble provides entirely contemporary comments on both the art historical moment he remembers, and the way things have changed over the past half century. Dibble’s works reflect on the gathering speed and complexity of the present moment, and the way that personal decisions delineate change. “Knoxville Embalmed” (2008), a roughly two foot square canvas, makes the looming, slashing liberties of a vintage DeKooning seem almost claustrophobic. Deep, distance-like pockets yawn behind deftly entwined marks and strokes, as the eye is alternately coaxed and rushed into a hybrid pictorial space. Dibble’s pale paint has a sun-bleached look, tightly packed on the surface like trash clumped in a cul-de-sac. Scrape marks and brush strokes shove or drag, pushing and pulling against each other. Half-buried rectangles are spread patch-like here and there, like trowelled adhesive cement. In “On Island McGee,” they’re stretched and pulled and twisted upwards. The images that emerge from these actions could be buildings and trees, water and sky – but felt more than seen. Dibble’s textures and combinations are terribly intimate, their rough and smooth passages brought up against the eye. They promise sensation, as if on the brink of sounding, tasting, and smelling. In a statement accompanying the exhibit Del Ray Loven talks about Willem DeKooning. “He said that when he was standing upright and secure on two feet, he didn’t feel like he was getting it right, but when he started to slip, just for a moment before he fell, he’d have a glimpse of the reality he wanted to paint.” Dibble’s paintings are vertiginous by the standards of ordinary vision; the “view” is looking at us. Dibble says of this current series, “Sometimes I felt I was inside and behind the painting, working my way out.” He also mentions an old adage that adds three more points to the usual compass: above, within, and below. The paintings at “Hope for the Picture Guild” find their subjects inside the skin of daily experience, rubbing along the underside of familiar scenes as they mix inner and outer perspectives.
Douglas Max Utter
http://www.douglasutter.com/dibblereviewforgt2.html
October 13th 2010
