Dibble Construction

Shaheen Modern and Contemporary in Cleveland honors the Bill Radawec legacy

2011-11-20T18:39:00.000-08:00

Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
The late Bill Radawec, a nationally admired Cleveland artist who died in July at age 59 after a yearlong battle with lymphoma, was a miniaturist who practiced a gentle art of nuance and fine distinctions.
A retrospective of Radawec’s work, now on view at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art in Cleveland, is full of delectable microphenomena, which attune the eye and the mind to small visual events that might easily be overlooked.
A tiny, copper-painted bird lies on its side on a square piece of plywood painted to resemble a piece of turf, which is in turn mysteriously set on the floor in a corner of the gallery. Another bird, this one painted silver, sits in a small wire basket suspended from the gallery ceiling.
On the walls, two small video cameras whir quietly on their mounts, turning this way and that, scanning the interior for some inscrutable purpose not revealed to the visitor. Also on the walls are pastel-hued geometric paintings inspired by paint chips and images of contrails left behind by jetliners in patches of clear blue sky.
A collection of small, wooden boxes mounted on the walls at oddly differing levels might escape notice entirely. But if you get close and peek inside, you’ll be treated to bizarre miniature tableaux, including one in which a woman strips naked at what appears to be an open-air tea party, while a construction worker stands nearby with a coil of cable in his hands and another fellow guzzles a bottle of wine.
The show is an eclectic mix of objects and images resembling the visual equivalents of Zen Buddhist koans, or riddles, that could produce effervescent moments of intellectual bliss if understood properly. Taken as a whole, the show is a fitting introduction, and tribute, to an artist known for having an odd, quirky and eccentric sensibility, liberally spiced with a well-developed sense of whimsy.

Ibojka Toth-RadawecA whimsical sculptural construction by the late Bill Radawec evokes the mystery of small events which take place around us everyday.

Born in 1952 in Parma, Radawec grew up there as the son of William Radawec, a firefighter, and Irene Radawec, a homemaker. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea in 1974 and pursued a master’s degree at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1975 and 76, but he ended his studies short of completion.
Radawec taught in Berea schools from 1979 to 82 and then spent the following decade teaching in Cleveland public schools. It wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles in 1992, however, that he began attracting serious attention as an artist and as a promoter of works by other artists.
Radawec’s widow, Ibojka Toth-Radawec, explains that in 1992, commercial galleries were closing in Los Angeles because of a recession. Radawec responded by inaugurating a series of exhibitions in the apartments or homes of friends, under the rubric “Domestic Setting.”
The shows caught the attention of the noted critic and curator Peter Frank, who gave Radawec a plug in LA Weekly, which in turn helped turn the shows into something of an underground movement.
“He loved to promote other artists,” Toth-Radawec said.
Radawec returned to Cleveland in 2000 to care for his aging mother after his father’s death. And he continued to produce art and to participate in exhibitions that caught the eye of reviewers from Art in America and other publications.
The show at Shaheen, assembled and installed with the assistance of his widow and friends, is characteristically oddball, with works hung high or low on walls or stuck in corners, as if to require extra effort and to encourage the viewer to take nothing for granted.
The cumulative effect is that of a quiet sense of joy and delight. Radawec never swings for the fences in any individual work but seeks instead to prick the conscience and tickle the funny bone.
Radawec was a conceptual artist, motivated more by ideas than by a drive to fashion imposing objects. His work pulls you in close and asks you to attend to fine details, like a comedian with a flat affect who tells short, droll stories with enigmatic punch lines.
At times, Radawec’s work is autobiographical. One framed panel re-creates a section of plaster wall in Radawec’s Los Angeles apartment, which formed a crack after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
The images of jet contrails were inspired by the arcs of jetliners changing course on Sept. 11, 2001, after terrorists took control.
It’s not strictly necessary to understand the personal meanings behind Radawec’s work in order to enjoy it. It casts a spell, even if you don’t know the back stories.

Ibojka Toth-RadawecA small construction hung on a wall in the Bill Radawec retrospective treats viewers to an overhead view of an unlikely scene in a mysterious roomlike setting, in which a woman strips bare while ladies appear to sip tea at a table and a guy in the corner guzzles a bottle of wine.

The most important personal narrative is that of the artist’s romance. He met Toth-Radawec at a gallery opening in Kent in 2004, four years after he returned to Northeast Ohio from Los Angeles. They married on Sept. 16, 2010, on the intensive-care floor at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, where Radawec was undergoing treatment.
Toth-Radawec says the ceremony was a first in the history of the unit.
The show at Shaheen is a first attempt to come to grips with Radawec’s artistic legacy. It admits the viewer into an aesthetic world shaped by one of the gentler artists who have worked in the region in recent decades. And it shows that Radawec’s unusual sensibility
lives on in the body of work he left behind.

Related topics: bill radawec, ibojka toth-radawec, peter frank, shaheen modern and contemporary art, steven litt

In a Glass Darkly / Elisabeth Sunday’s Spiritus at Tregoning & Co.

2011-11-06T16:51:00.000-08:00

By Douglas Max Utter

www.douglasutter.com

The impact of Elisabeth Sunday’s photographs showing one or two persons in their native landscapes comes in part from imagining how and where they were created. Personal interaction and shared psychological space are implicit in the melting gray and black tones of the images themselves, which show their subjects reflected along the undulating surface of a specially made mirror. During extended international journeys over the past quarter century Sunday has used this device to establish an unusual ratio between her own sense of self and the persons / personas that ebb and flow through her mirror, taking the psychological measure of observer and those observed alike as she places her subjects at a double remove from direct observation. This distancing technique tends to outflank the usual questions and doubts that often linger in the wake of both documentary and artistic photography, appealing (somewhat in the manner of surrealism) to a different authority: the timelessness characteristic of the unconscious mind. Farther in the background of her work’s content is Sunday’s exploration of her identity as a woman born to a family of successful artists, and as the daughter of the African American stained glass artist and painter Douglas Phillips.

Sunday’s most recent photographs of men and women living in Ghana, Mali, and Ethiopia are at once forceful and oblique. The figures, dressed in traditional garb or sometimes elaborately painted (as in the case of pictures showing the Koro men of Ethiopia’s Omo Valley region), loom monolithically, expressing a superhuman intensity. Typically Sunday captures an elongated vertical reflection, rushing and bleeding like a single expressive brush stroke. Although Sunday herself is never visible in the frame, she is as much actor as she is director within the drama of these photographs, as she strives to represent not so much the personal characteristics of her subjects, but an essential gesture that connects a given incarnation with the long history of the soul.

In the gold-toned silver print titled “Hope” a man stands on the shore. Five long silvery fish are draped over his shoulders and clutched cape-like across his chest – he seems a god from the sea, dressed in a dream. In “Lifeline” another man hugs a large fish, holding its long body against his own and its sharply tapering head next to his face, while just behind him the sea churns enormously, exploding in painterly-looking rhythms below a narrow strip of blank sky. These and other gold-toned silver prints were shot in Ghana and are the fruits of a relationship that Sunday developed over the past several years with five Akan fishermen who still sail hand-hewn boats into the dark waters of the Gulf of Guinea during the hours before dawn. When Sunday asked them to express their love of the sea the results were startlingly iconic, suggesting primordial links between daily human experience and ancient natural forces.

Implicit in the intertwining skeins of light that bounce across a curved reflecting surface is the recognition that there can be no sure way to capture the rhythms of human life. Sunday’s art is part vision, part accident, and her method is a kind of invocation. She writes about the role of her mirrors (she has had more than one made; last year one became cracked) in a recent blog posting: “The muse is tuned and waiting for me to engage it and bring out the images, calling them forward.” Sunday makes it clear that not just the mirrors but the journeys and events surrounding her photographs work together to cultivate the “muse,” deepening and focusing initial inspirations. All of this, as well as her central mirror-recreated trope of elongation, is part of a profound process of personal growth that began for Sunday in 1982, when she had a number of ongoing dreams about Africa. These were what C. G. Jung might have recognized as dreams of deep transformation, calling forth instinctual energies, and their point of departure was an unusual depiction of flattened and elongated women’s heads and faces painted in 1931 by her grandfather, the noted Cleveland School artist and African traveler Paul Bough Travis. In a kaleidoscopic swirl of imagery the dreams went on to show Sunday nothing less than the creation of the world, from mountains to animals and peoples, stretching and bending in great waves across long ages. Sunday’s first trip to Africa was made soon after this intense period of dreaming, as were her initial experiments with mirror photography.

The largest recent works are 70 inch tall pigment on rag prints from Sunday’s Anima and Animus series. If even her smaller platinum prints often seem to loom, these larger than life figures are all but hallucinatory in the impending power they project. Sunday here is meditating on eternal masculine and feminine energies, using warlike Koro men and nomadic Tuareg women as subjects. The Anima women are hidden under flowing garments, slanting to left or right or reaching upward like dark flames against the steady white curve of a dune. Their dance-like postures show just the angle of an elbow or a knee, suggesting the geometry of the human body swathed in smoky potency, yielding and enveloping.

The Animus figures rise like tough young trees or spears, rooted somewhere beneath the picture plane. Grace and violence here seem cast together in a solid block, as in Animus 1, which shows a ghost-like figure daubed in white up to the top of his chest. It’s as if the sheer thrust of aggression has fused his arms and legs into a single mass, and his whitened profile tilts downward, like a giant regarding the earth. As with so many of Elisabeth Sunday’s figures, these seem composed of stone or bone more than living flesh, bent along universal lines of force, long-buried or drowned but astonishingly rediscovered through the photographer’s process and passion.

Dreamers Are Tough

2011-10-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

Wishing God Well

2011-07-20T15:14:00.000-07:00

Before I begin to paint I sit quietly and gather my
attention.

I begin to pray for all artists and artists families.

All families.

All human beings.

All living things.

The Angels and Archangels.

Wishing God well.

I’m ready to work.

Preview- Exhibition Catalogue: Aspects Of Modern Life @ Tregoning and Company

2011-07-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

MATT DIBBLE by Tregoning & Company

Make Your Own Book

Jackknife (oil on canvas) 73"x80" 2011

2011-07-13T18:36:00.000-07:00

Venus, Amigo? (mixed technique on canvas) 75"x80" 2011

2011-06-11T09:46:00.000-07:00

The Body

2011-05-03T07:08:00.000-07:00

It's been said that even the angels ache for a body, sometimes. If I did figurative work what would it look like? I asked my self this question recently. I soon realized that figures were part of my work for many years, an ongoing series of pen and ink drawings.

Projecting them on larger canvases I was able to find many new compositions and entanglements. I’m often asked where the figures originate. Their is an ache in my body, on the outside everything is calm, the inside is much different.

The postures here are not meant to be literal. I’m trying to create an impression, as simply as possible that describes my two natures. One grasping and one allowing.

This figurative paintings are very personal and I resisted doing it for a long time, but over the last 4 or 5 years it just poured out of me.

The work in this show is a continuation of the “Puzzled Biped” series; I’ve experimented with dress samples and news print to bring more interest to the surface.

Sacrebleu is a mild French oath, meant as a cry of surprise or anger.

After I exhibited some paintings at Asterisk Gallery in 2009 Dana and I began planning a show together. This exhibition is a result of those plans.

Matt Dibble

May 3rd, 2011

I’m pleased to announce that nationally recognized artist www.randalltiedman and acclaimed painter/sculpture www.lorennaji.com will be selecting the work of Dana Depew and Matt Dibble for a Spring 2011 Painting Exhibition in Cleveland ,Ohio.

To open May 6th at the Loren Naji Studio Gallery 2138 West 25th St. Cleveland,Ohio 44113

(Ample parking across the street.)

Our Harsh Reality: Matt Dibble's paintings share the gritty thrill of local life @ Tregoning and Co.

2011-04-20T07:21:00.000-07:00

Douglas Max Utter
www.douglasutter.com

Matt Dibble's abstract painting "Lake Erie Shoreline" feels like a long minute lived somewhere along Ohio's north coast. The small work mixes brutal masses of bluish black with streaks and splashes of white, as if the painter had ripped a cold chunk out of a March day. It's a painting that remembers intimate, difficult things — the way an early morning fits roughly over the night before, and how easily the wind unravels the sunshine.
At least that's the way Cleveland often feels during its long winter. And some of Dibble's latest oil paintings, now on display in Aspects of Modern Life at Tregoning & Company (www.tregoningandco.com) bring it all back. Not that everything is so grim. A few of the works, like the large, almost impressionistic "Emptied Countryside," positively bloom, with bursts of light pink and gray-blue pushing around a six-foot-square surface.
Plus, there's the fact that this painter's rough, patched-seeming, highly textural visions often have a sort of curbside appeal. Not that Dibble's view is from the curb. There's no ad for a cozy lifestyle embedded in this work. The hard-looking surfaces he paints are often actually much like the curb itself — a place down by the cracked street, where mud and snow pile together during long gray days, filled with the harsh excitement of life's challenges. Like life itself in Cleveland, things may be hard in this painted world, but they're not boring.
Simply put, these are good paintings because they're about real things. They convey the daily contrasts of comfort and unease, effort and balance, while speaking also of qualities of the spirit. Determination, discouragement, and discovery are all part of the action.
Like 1950s action paintings, they're partly about the body's movements and partly about effort. Yet there is a big difference between what Dibble does and what the men and women of his parents' generation painted. His crossings and sudden combinations weave workmanlike solutions to a question that was rarely asked so explicitly in an earlier era: What does it mean — what does it look like — to build a practical exercise that has as few aesthetic or philosophical pretensions as possible? It's a matter of tense, too, and effectualness: What is the nature of the thing that has happened; when is a job done? If the individual expression that artists once sought now seems naive, it's still true that the problem of fitting the gray into the brown, or bending it across the blue, is entirely one's own business, like washing your feet.
That's one way these paintings do their job: by asking no more than that. But they're also successful because, in the process of asking and answering such purely physical questions, they end up describing specific places and states, in terms that have both geographical and spiritual elements. The fact that Matt Dibble has worked as a roofer for more than two decades (though he's been an exhibiting artist for even longer), and that he is able to make paintings that re-create aspects of that perilous and demanding occupation, is literally a big part of the picture here. There's a level of sensitivity that endless climbing and hammering and looking have made possible.
But maybe most important is the fact that the experience he re-creates in such tactile detail is part of the spirit of the place in which he lives.
In a way, Dibble's exhibition is about here and now, and about Cleveland. But it covers more ground than that. Two of the finest titles in the show are "Middle Is Everywhere" and "Starved Wolf." The first describes exactly what Dibble does. And with the other phrase, you can almost see Dibble's wolf chewing away at the empty spaces of the canvas. It's a reminder that every mark makes a home for the mind's zoo of images, and that every line feeds the spirit.

Aspects of Modern Life

2011-03-27T10:50:00.000-07:00

Aspects of Modern Life
Opens at www.tregoningandco.com April 15th,2011

My wish is to live in the real world. I have a natural curiosity about my place on earth and a thirst for sincerity in all forms. “Aspects of Modern Life” is a glimpse into what happens when this very active inner life and the outer world come in contact.

I tried to work on these new paintings with “feeling” in my whole body. I’m note quite as interested in brushing the paint on, but pushing the paint around.

In this series, I’m trying to approach the work as a tradesman approaches his job, in a very ordinary way, with a watchful attention and a certain confidence that comes from experience while at the same time searching for something new.

How can I bring more sensitivity to the color? This is the question that would not leave me alone during my painting sessions and at other moments. Coming back to this question often, it became very alive in me.

Matthew Dibble
March 27th, 2011

Sacrebleu : Dibble @ Depew- Spring 2011 Painting Exhibition

2011-01-15T06:23:00.000-08:00

I’m pleased to announce that nationally recognized Artist Randall Tiedman www.RandallTiedman.com and acclaimed painter/sculpture Loren Naji www.lorennaji.com will be selecting the work of Dana Depew and Matt Dibble for a Spring 2011 Painting Exhibition in Cleveland ,Ohio.
To open May 6th at the Loren Naji Studio Gallery 2138 West 25th St. Cleveland,Ohio 44113
(Ample parking across the street.)

Above, Below, Within: Matt Dibble at Arts Collinwood-Preview from Giraffe Trap Magazine Issue 2

2010-10-14T07:14:00.000-07:00

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

Matt Dibble at Arts Collinwood : Sept. 17th through Oct 16th 2010

2010-09-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

“Hope for the Picture Guild” is the title of Matt’s latest show which opened Friday September 17 at the Arts Collinwood Gallery www.artscollinwood.org on Cleveland’s east side and is appropriately named as the show itself seems to be a counterpunch to the Postmodernist assertion that painting is dead.

The show consists of 17 abstract works on canvas selected from the artist’s recent body of work by Del Rey Loven, painting professor at the University of Akron, who served as a kind of curator for the venue. The space at Arts Collinwood provided a perfect setting for this show as the atmosphere of the neighborhood served as the ideal backdrop for Matt’s work. As one approaches the gallery from the street, you feel as if you could very well be in New York in the late 40’s and 50’s as the bold, gutsy paintings by Dibble are evident in this gritty but efficient space.

The first painting that grabs your attention from its position on the street-facing wall is a large black and white 70x76 inch oil on canvas titled, “Bachelors Still Asleep.” Its spontaneous strokes of black over a white background immediately recall the work of Franz Kline. However, Dibble is not imitating Kline here. There seems to be a hidden order of repetitive pattern that the viewer is invited to solve. It is kind of like those aptitude tests where you are given a series of three numbers, discern the pattern, and come up with the next number in the sequence.

Canvases of various sizes are hung well and the show comes together in a comprehensive, purposeful manner. Loven has done an excellent job here and this body of work speaks to a definite thesis. The larger works seem to be more successful than the smaller ones, and perhaps the strongest two are the 72”x84” “Penchant for Dueling” and the 80”x80” “Frowning Alpine”, both oils on canvas. Both works are aggressive multi-layered, multi-colored abstracts which are respectful nods to the patron saint of AbEx painting, Willem Dekooning. The scraps of newspaper impregnated into the paint works like a signature to those familiar with the nitty-gritty of DeKooning’s work. Although his gestures are bold, Dibble’s colors are of a soft muted key and are very carefully controlled to be just unsettling enough to eschew decoration.

As you move through the exhibition and begin to digest these paintings, Dibble’s brilliance becomes more evident. It hits you square in the eyes. These works are not nostalgic imitations pulled from the by-gone era of abstract expressionism, but relevant and valid ideas that resonate today. It is clear from the vibe on the streets of the historic Collinwood neighborhood: the bohemians strolling along the sidewalks, the DJ setting up on the corner, the street musicians, and the funky shops. This is work of the here and now. Painting is not dead. Dibble’s show at Arts Collinwood challenges the Postmodernism notion that you must tear down the past in order to create something new. “Hope for the Picture Guild” articulates nicely that we are not done learning from the past and offers an inside joke to those that are listening.

By Bill Chill www.williamchill.com

The space is surprisingly well suited for the paintings. Del Ray curated a very good show here, well balanced to the room, with each work to the others.
It is also very well installed.
William Tregoning- Art Dealer
www.tregoningandco.com

Matt's paintings are gutsy. He has a firm understanding of underlying structure--his instincts in regard to composition, color and application place him in very select company. This is a powerful exhibition of top-tier work.
Ross Lesko- Director, Kenneth Paul Lesko Gallery
www.kennethpaullesko.com

Matt Dibble gets his work to come to life in the painting process. He creates space there, in the paintings, that’s all it’s own … Dibble puts color upon color, shape upon shape in a manner that is both first rate craftsmanship and high-risk aesthetic adventurism. I selected these paintings because they represent Matt at the top of his game.”
Professor Del Rey Loven-Mary Schiller Myers School of Art.

New Abstract Paintings by Matthew Dibble to Debut

2010-08-30T08:27:00.000-07:00

NEWS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CLEVELAND — August 30, 2010 — On Friday, September 17, Arts Collinwood Gallery will showcase recent abstract paintings from Cleveland artist Matthew Dibble in a solo exhibition titled “Hope for the Picture Guild.” The paintings will be on display through October 17.

For this show, works were selected by Del Rey Loven, Director, Mary Schiller Myers School of Art, Akron University.

Loven explains, “Matt Dibble gets his work to come to life in the painting process. He creates space there, in the paintings, that’s all it’s own … Dibble puts color upon color, shape upon shape in a manner that is both first rate craftsmanship and high-risk aesthetic adventurism. I selected these paintings because they represent Matt at the top of his game.”

Steven Litt, winner of the 2010 Cleveland Arts Prize and critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, commented in a recent review, “Dibble has oceans of energy and a great deal of visual intelligence.”

French collector and critic Christian Schmitt (www.espacetrevisse.com), said of Dibble’s abstract work, “Painter of the absolute, M. Dibble requires that art reveal to him the absolute of being. This is why his abstracts are ravaged by an abundance of impulses. The massiveness, debauchery and violence of the brush strokes seem to violently provoke the paint so that the hidden, the unsaid, is unveiled.”

Douglas Max Utter, noted Cleveland artist, critic, and editor of e-zine Giraffe Trap (www.giraffetrap.com), commented, “For a painter’s painter like Dibble, versed in the tensions of modernist work from Cezanne to DeKooning, the central activity of his art is to choreograph an ever more intense dance involving these two eternally incompatible partners [drawing and painting].”

Dibble’s work has been exhibited at various venues such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, www.tregoningandco.com S.P.A.C.E.S., and the Butler Institute of American Art. His paintings and drawings reside in private and corporate collections in the U.S. and France.

Arts Collinwood is located at 15601 Waterloo Rd. in the Collinwood neighborhood of Cleveland. For more information, visit www.artscollinwood.org. For more information on Matthew Dibble, please visit www.dibblepaintings.com.

Media Contact

Michelle Maniscalco
m.maniscalco@sbcglobal.net
216-401-8677

Dibble Construction,LLC- Receives Better Business Bureau Accreditation

2010-08-17T14:28:00.000-07:00

For Immediate Release – Date 8-17- 2010

Dibble Construction,LLC announced today that it has received Better Business Bureau (BBB) accreditation.

"Accreditation is an honor – many businesses are not eligible," said David Weiss, BBB president. "Businesses that meet our high standards are invited to apply for accreditation. Applicants undergo a review process and ultimate approval by our Board of Directors."

Businesses seeking BBB accreditation must commit to the BBB Code of Business Practices. The Code is a comprehensive set of policies, procedures and best practices on how businesses treat consumers. These standards call for building trust, embodying integrity, advertising honestly and telling the truth, being transparent, honoring promises, being responsive and safeguarding privacy.

BBB was founded in 1912 with a mission of fostering a fair marketplace and continues to be a resource for the public, providing objective, unbiased information about businesses. Reports on over three million businesses and charities are available at cleveland.bbb.org. A key piece of information that helps consumers make informed decisions is whether a company is BBB accredited. According to BBB, seven of 10 consumers say they are more likely to buy from a company designated as a BBB Accredited Business.

"We are proud to be a BBB Accredited Business," said Matt Dibble "It signifies our commitment to customer service, reliability and trust. For any organization to excel in today's environment, it is critical that they be fully committed to excellence. Our acknowledgment by the BBB aligns with and supports our efforts of providing superior service in the marketplace."

Hope For The Picture Guild: Del Rey Loven on Matt Dibble

2010-08-11T17:56:00.000-07:00

Professor Del Rey Loven talks about his selections for my up coming show at www.artscollinwood.org opening September 17th 2010

The year is 2010. This is the year Dennis Hopper died. Dennis Hopper was a damn good abstract painter and post-modernist artist. He came out of the abstract expressionist, pop-art era, but was known as an actor. He called himself a painter, who acted for a living.

Matt Dibble is an artist, both post-modern and abstract, who does roofing for a living. Thankfully Matt is not known for his roofing, he’s known for his painting, and he’s a damn good artist.

Jackson Pollock said: “A painting has a life, let the painting live.” In those monumental pictures that Pollock made, he created a space, and noted art critic Robert Hughes said these paintings were akin to the monumental landscapes of the American West. Hughes said, “It’s like a space you can move into.”

Matt Dibble gets his work to come to life in the painting process. He creates space in the paintings that’s all it’s own.

Willem De Kooning 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, for just a moment before he fell, he’d have a glimpse at the reality he wanted to paint. He called himself a slipping glimpser.

Sometimes, in Matt’s studio (the aesthetic roof he has created) when you look at the paintings, such a dynamic space is created, you can just see the artist slipping on that steep pitch, tumbling into the magnificent, violent, exulted and indescribable space.

It’s been said the aesthetic experience is an ineffable one. You can’t fully put it into words what you experience when you see a Matt Dibble painting. There is so much going on.

He is a man who knows his medium. Every bit as a roofer knows how to put one shingle down on another, Dibble puts color upon color, shape upon shape in workmanlike manner that is both first rate craftsmanship and high-risk aesthetic adventurism. I selected these paintings because they represent Matt at the top of his game.

Del Rey Loven-recorded August 10th 2010

Del Rey Loven's paintings have been exhibited in numerous American venues, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Minnesota Museum of Art, and the Louis Meisel Gallery, New York City. His work as an educator has been driven by the question, "What will be the role of the creative person in twenty-first century society?", and guided by the conviction that "when there is a creative gift, there will be a place of service." This has led him to research and develop academic programs in Art, Visual Communications, and Architecture. The Bauhaus model of integrating academic studies in Art, Architecture, Craft, Design and Industry has been a longtime inspiration.

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland Releases Design for New Building.

2010-07-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

CLEVELAND, OH.- The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA) today released the design for its new facility, following its presentation and approval at a meeting of the City Planning Commission. The project is designed by the internationally acclaimed firm Foreign Office Architects (FOA), London. The Museum anticipates that it will break ground for the $26.3 million project in fall/winter 2010.

The nearly 34,000-square-foot, four-story structure is FOA’s first major building in the United States and its first museum. It will provide MOCA with street presence for the first time in its forty-plus-year history, and will enable it to present a diversity of innovative exhibitions and programs, while appealing to both current and new audiences. At the same time, it will give the city of Cleveland and its cultural community a signature building for contemporary art and ideas.

Located at the intersection of Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road, the new MOCA is a flagship project of Cleveland’s emerging Uptown district, a major urban revitalization project undertaken by Case Western Reserve University; developer MRN, Ltd.; and other institutions in the University Circle neighborhood. The Museum will serve as a catalyst for creativity and growth in the area—which is home to one of the country’s largest concentrations of cultural, educational, and medical institutions—with greatly expanded educational and public programs, as well as imaginative collaborations with neighboring organizations and cultural partners.

MOCA Director Jill Snyder says, “The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is elated that the design for its new building has been approved by the City Planning Commission. This represents an endorsement of FOA’s inspired building-design and a recognition of the critical importance of MOCA to the cultural life of the city. FOA’s design for our building is the perfect expression of our program—one that will not only enable us to operate at the highest level, but that will also be beautiful, intriguing, and sensitive to our urban surroundings and community. The Museum’s ability to realize this project during a period of economic instability is a clear testament to the vision and dedication of MOCA’s Board leadership and community funders.”

Farshid Moussavi, principal of FOA, adds, “As FOA’s first museum and first U.S. commission, this is an especially meaningful and inspirational project for us. Museums today are not just homes for art, but serve multiple functions and host a variety of activities. Our design for MOCA Cleveland aims to provide visitors with a museum that is a dynamic public space in which to experience contemporary art in its infinite manifestations.”

In addition to Foreign Office Architects, the design team for the new Museum includes executive architects Westlake Reed Leskosky, headquartered in Cleveland and designers of more than fifty cultural buildings throughout the United States.

Building Design
The new MOCA, which will be forty-four percent larger than the Museum’s current, leased facility, will demonstrate that a museum expansion need not be large in scale to be ambitious in all respects. Devised for both environmental and fiscal sustainability, the design for the four-story building is at once technically inventive, visually stunning, and highly practical.

FOA has responded ingeniously to the project’s roughly triangular site by designing a building with a hexagonal base that, with imperceptible changes in the shape of each story, rises to a square roof. Viewed from the exterior, the building will appear as an inventive massing of six geometric facets, some flat, others sloping at various angles, all coming together to create a powerful abstract form.

Clad primarily in mirror-finish black Rimex stainless steel, the façade of the new MOCA will reflect its urban surroundings, changing in appearance with differences in light and weather. Window glazing will be tinted to assimilate with the reflective skin so that during the day the building will read as a unified volume, while at night interior lights will create a dynamic pattern on the dark surface.

Three of the building’s six facets, one of them clad in transparent glass, will flank a public plaza. This will provide a public gathering place and also serve as MOCA’s “front yard,” and will be the setting for seasonal programming. From here, visitors and passersby may look through the transparent facet, site of the Museum entrance, into the ground floor, a space intended for socializing and for civic and cultural events.

While the building’s dark exterior will offer almost no hint of the interior massing and structure, the experience inside will be notably transparent. Upon entering MOCA, visitors will find themselves in an atrium from which they may visually grasp the dynamic shape and structure of the building as it rises. This space will lead in turn to the Museum’s lobby, café, and shop, and to a double-height multipurpose room that will house public programs and other events. From here, visitors may take the Museum’s staircase—itself a monumental sculptural object or an elevator to the upper floors.

Because MOCA is a non-collecting institution—one of the few such contemporary art museums in the country—its new building does not need to accommodate collection galleries. In order to achieve maximum flexibility for the museum’s diverse exhibitions, the main gallery has been sited at the top of the building. There it will be structurally unencumbered, needing only to hold the lightweight roof, the underside of which will be fully visible from the gallery. Moveable walls will enable the 6,000-square-foot space to be divided into a variety of configurations. This floor will also contain a gallery designed specifically for new-media work and a lounge with a view of the city, where visitors can relax, reflect on what they have seen, and read about the exhibitions.

Ms. Snyder notes, “As Cleveland’s only museum of contemporary art, MOCA is committed to presenting exhibitions that break new ground, showing the work of emerging artists from across the globe as well as from our own region. Flexibility is key to a program that, like ours, embraces aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural diversity, and displays works in a great variety of mediums and genres. We are thrilled with the gallery space planned for the new Museum.”

While the main exhibition gallery is on the top floor, all four floors of the Museum contain space for either exhibitions or public programs, with the second and third floors combining public and “back of house” functions. The second floor, for example, will house both exhibition workshops and a 1,500-square-foot public gallery, to be used for more intimately scaled exhibitions; consonant with the openness that is characteristic of the building’s interior, visitors approaching this gallery by stair will also be able to glimpse the workshops. The third floor, home to MOCA’s administrative offices, will also include spaces for classes, lectures, and other educational programs.

In keeping with the ways in which contemporary visitors engage with art, the new building will have wi-fi throughout, enabling the use of wireless devices for on demand learning. MOCA anticipates that the building will receive LEED silver accreditation.

PIG IRON by Matthew Dibble- Review by Christian Schmitt

2010-06-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

Matthew Dibble started painting relatively late in life, despite having always drawn since age 13. He began drawing using India ink and has remained fascinated by this dark liquid.
Later, he tried several times to take up painting; however, he often found it too demanding and eventually went back to drawing.
He felt that what he depicted in his small drawings were often times more intense and profound that what he could portray in his large canvases. And it was only recently that he felt truly capable of transposing his greatest aspirations to large paintings.
Furthermore, his early canvases often covered themes and images from mythology that he had already elaborately developed in his drawings.
Now, with the painting “Pig Iron” and others from 2008, Matthew Dibble seems to mark the start of a new turning point in his work leading him to completely abstract paintings. This painting is surprising due to the abundance of paint and violence exhibited. Paint constantly pummeled and lacerated by the painter and which sadly shows a wounded and devastated world.
In doing so, Matthew Dibble returns to the school of abstract expressionism, which has had a strong presence in American painting since World War II.
In fact, the new direction that he has taken surprisingly resembles that of Rothko who, in 1946, with a new series of paintings called Multiforms, would also develop an abstract language in his paintings. He has also previously lived through a period marked by mythological themes.
The same Rothko started out painting shapes like organs giving as a pretext that “my art is not abstract; it lives and breathes.” Furthermore, “…Any picture which does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.”
De Kooning himself also excelled in abstraction. Even after the war, he quite often continued to mix abstraction and figuration; however, in the 1950s, he would firmly turn to abstract and gestural painting with large brush strokes resembling gestures of liberation.
In this school of abstract painting in the U.S., Jackson Pollock must not be forgotten. Pollock, however, distinguishes himself by action painting, by gestural painting which primarily characterizes his work. Far from being only a technique, gestural painting allows the painter’s work to be objectified.
“Dripping” allowed him to resolve the antinomy between the color and stroke, to unite form and color, drawing and painting in the same spreading gesture. In short, thanks to this method, Pollock’s painting is becoming spontaneously one.
However, none of this is present in Matthew Dibbles work, because if the “Pig Iron” painting is indeed a part of the sphere of influence of abstract expressionism as previously described, it cannot be connected to Action Painting.
Loaded with an overwhelming number of impulses, this work remains in fact decisively abstract due to its torturous look. But since the painter still uses a brush or some other instrument that he applies directly to the canvas, there is no objectification like there is in Pollock’s painting.
This is a dark painting, having generous amounts of pigments distributed with aggressive brush strokes of heavy, violent colors. It is slashed everywhere with large zigzagging, crisscrossing brush strokes.
You can also see large knife strokes, from the spatula or the brush which notably lead to the creation of a deep gap in the middle of the painting and numerous areas of flat tints.
The spatula or knife at times brutally slashes the canvas, skinning it alive and even depriving it of its substance. In certain areas (at the top and bottom of the painting), it is at times literally decimated.
The result of this violence leads to the creation of pockets of paint appearing here and there resembling piles of snow appearing, which once dry creates a sort of tumulus or crater. All these sporadic heaps of paint give birth to the surface of the canvas similar to the surface of the moon.
The title “Pig Iron” which can be translated into French by the melting obtained by fusing iron ore in blast-furnaces justifies the particular painting techniques used in this canvas. Cleveland, the city where the painter lives, was an important industrial centre up until the second half of the twentieth century before undergoing a restructuring into the financial and insurance sectors.
Matthew Dibble thus lived a large part of his life surrounded by this heavy industry and by the intense activity of the blast-furnaces, steel mills and rolling mills that were part of his daily setting. All this must have equally been his inspiration for certain scenes from mythology such as the works of Vulcan, the god of fire.
Moreover, the melting obtained by fusing iron ore in blast-furnaces, iron ore which itself is pieces extracted from the earth forces us to participate in a show that resembles the birth of the world.
The colors contribute to this original world by the use of darker, more mysterious pigments: a dreary palette pulling towards grey and muddy brown. But also the green that springs up from the central gap and a range of other tints which appear by sporadic brush strokes but without bringing any real clarity to the group of colors (pink on the right, blue on the left and other nuances of brown, red…).
By darkening the composition, the color helps to make it even more impermeable and dense, also concealing its interior liveliness.
This original space painted by Matthew Dibble brings to mind what Henri Maldiney said about certain scenes painted by Cézanne:
“The sub-spatial scheme of every space, the sub-cosmic scheme of every world, that is, a metaphysical deepness” (Maldiney Henri, The ambiguity of the image of the painting, Paris-Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme, 1973).
Indeed, like Cézanne, M. Dibble’s work does not follow the path of academic illusionism, it claims to be fundamental, wakes up a dormant song in all things, so that the work becomes a sort of event arriving.
Since M. Dibble follows mythological themes, this must be understood in his works as an attempt to favor universal issues. There is a hidden order deep within his work. Despite an apparent disorder, the space is organized according to an internal logic thanks to an internal animation and an organic architecture.
In all major works, you find the same reality that Ehrenzweig describes:
“The assault of irrationality against rationality” and where a new order appears, “a hidden order in the structure of art.” (Ehrenzweig’s book – The Hidden Order of Art)
Rothko also thought that art must go deeper:
“The love of art is a ‘feast of ideas’… the crucial point for us isn’t the explanation, but rather knowing if the essential ideas that the painting must communicate have any importance.”
He saw a mystical force in his painting. The chromatic expansions, the areas of color, they possessed according to him a real supernatural power.
And quite often to get to this point of no return, you must, according to the poet Henri Michaux “pierce the skin of something” just to “in the words of Husserl, return to the very thing itself.”
“Pig Iron” is the manifestation of these original worlds, the melting by fusion coming directly from the bowels of the earth. But beyond that, the painter sends us to different reality, one in which the world and earth, light and reservation fight.
Painter of the absolute, M. Dibble requires that art reveal to him the absolute of being. This is why this painting is ravaged by an abundance of impulses, the massiveness, debauchery and violence of the brush strokes to violently provoke the paint so that the hidden, the unsaid is unveiled.
This aggressiveness is created particularly by the gestures of liberation on the canvas, by the lacerations from the knife, the blade of the spatula or the brush. The painter seems to surrender himself to the chaos of sensations, chaos which overwhelms things, gives the illusion of movement while reproducing in some way shockwaves from the universal big bang.
Like Cézanne, he is looking for organization within a painting, the fusion of like things to the geological foundation of the world. The master of Aix-en Provence wanted durable, solid art and was constantly searching for the substantial and timeless side of nature.
Here with this painting, which is supposed to reproduce the melted flow coming out of a blast furnace, the painter also aims to convey the depths this flow. Comparable to the being, it deals with restoring the depths of the being.
Thanks to this work which makes the melting by fusion take shape, the painter leads us pass the simple, superficial experience to make it constantly younger et become like a third eye, a vision from a metaphysical scope.
This falls in line with the analysis of Martin Heidegger who believes that only the work of art allows the being to be unveiled.
“Art makes the truth spew out. Taking the initiative with a single step, art brings the truth to light, while protecting the truth of the coming-to-be. Bringing something to light, bringing it to being from the essential origin and the initial leap, this is what the word “origin” means to us.” (The Origin of the Work of Art by Martin Heidegger).
Oddly enough, this revelation of being also sends us to ancient Greece, home of the mythology that M. Dibble is particularly fond of. In fact, Parmenides, a philosopher who preceded Socrates, already said it best with these seemingly simple words: “the being is; the non-being isn’t.”
With these words, Parmenides sums up the question of being which according to Heidegger had been forgotten in the history of metaphysics. However, for the German philosopher, forgetting the being is not a mere negligence in thought, but rather a part of its structure.
For him, Western thinking does not let the being be. Only painters and Cézanne particularly really allow the truth about the being and the coming-to-be to come about.
From this famous statement by Cézanne: “What I am trying to convey is more mysterious than anything. It’s the labyrinth of the roots themselves of the being, at the source of impalpable sensations.”
This is why we can catch a glimpse of the being when looking at the painting “Pig Iron”, while understanding the work from another standpoint and feeling this impalpable sensation.
Metz, June 11, 2010
Christian Schmitt

PIG IRON de MATTHEW DIBBLE-Break Down by Christian Schmitt

2010-06-13T07:11:00.000-07:00

Matthew Dibble est venu tardivement à la peinture, lui qui a toujours pratiqué le dessin depuis l'âge de 13 ans. Il commença à dessiner en utilisant l'encre de Chine et est resté longtemps fasciné par ce liquide noir.

Par la suite, il a essayé à plusieurs reprises la peinture, mais la trouvant souvent trop exigeante, il a dû régulièrement retourner au dessin.

Il estimait que ce qu'il représentait dans ces petits dessins était souvent plus intense et plus profond que ce qu'il pouvait réaliser dans ses grandes toiles. Et ce n'est que récemment qu'il se sent véritablement capable de transposer ses aspirations les plus élevées dans les peintures de grand format.

Par ailleurs, ses premières toiles reprennent souvent les thèmes et les motifs d'origine mythologique qu'il développait déjà abondamment dans ses dessins.

Or avec le tableau « Pig Iron » et d'autres de la même année 2008, Matthew Dibble semble inaugurer un nouveau tournant dans son œuvre le conduisant à des peintures entièrement abstraites. Une peinture qui surprend par l'abondance de la matière et par la violence qui s'y déploie. Une matière constamment triturée et lacérée par le peintre et qui offre le triste spectacle d'un univers meurtri et dévasté.

Ce faisant Matthew Dibble rejoint l'école de l'expressionnisme abstrait qui a marqué fortement la peinture américaine depuis la deuxième guerre mondiale.

En effet la nouvelle direction qu'il a prise ressemble étonnamment à celle d'un certain Rothko qui à partir de 1946 avec une nouvelle série de tableaux, les Multiform, développera également un langage abstrait dans ses peintures. Lui aussi connut antérieurement une période marquée par les thèmes mythologiques.

Ce même Rothko avait peint au début des formes comme des organes en prétextant : "Mon art n'est pas abstrait; il vit et respire". Et plus loin : « ...Un tableau qui n'apporte pas un environnement dans lequel peut s'insuffler le souffle de la vie ne m'intéresse pas. »

De Kooning lui aussi a excellé dans l'abstraction. Même si après la guerre, il mélangeait encore très souvent abstraction et figuration, par contre il se tournera résolument dans les années 50 dans une peinture abstraite et gestuelle avec de larges coups de pinceaux comme des gestes de libération.

Dans cette école de la peinture abstraite aux Etats Unis, il ne faut pas oublier bien évidemment Jackson Pollock. Mais celui-ci se distingue plutôt par l'Action painting, par cette gestualité qui caractérise principalement son travail. Loin d'être seulement une technique, celle-ci permet d'objectiver le travail du peintre.

Le "dripping" lui a permis de résoudre l'antinomie entre la couleur et le trait, d'unir dans le même geste d'épandage la forme et la couleur, le dessin et la peinture. Bref grâce à cette méthode, la peinture de Pollock devient spontanément unitaire.

Par contre dans le travail de Matthew Dibble rien de tout cela, puisque si le tableau "Pig Iron" s'inscrit effectivement dans la mouvance de l'expressionnisme abstrait tel qu'il est décrit précédemment, celui-ci ne peut être relié à l'Action Painting

Chargée d'un trop plein de pulsions, cette œuvre reste en effet résolument abstraite par son aspect tourmenté. Mais comme le peintre utilise toujours le pinceau ou un autre instrument qu'il applique directement sur la toile, il n'y a donc pas de phénomène d'objectivation comme c'est le cas pour la peinture de Pollock.

Son oeuvre se présente comme une peinture épaisse, très généreuse en pigments et distribuée en touches agressives de couleurs sourdes et violentes. Elle est lacérée de toutes parts par des grands coups de pinceaux qui se croisent, s'entrecroisent ou zigzaguent.

On observe également de larges passages du couteau, de la spatule ou de la brosse ce qui conduit notamment à la création d'une profonde trouée au milieu de la composition et à de nombreux aplats.

La spatule ou le couteau lacère parfois avec beaucoup de brutalité la matière jusqu'à l'écorcher à vif, la dépouillant même de sa substance. A certains endroits (en haut et en bas de l'œuvre), la peinture est parfois littéralement éradiquée.

Le résultat de cette violence conduit à la création de poches de peinture comme des moutonnements de congères apparaissant ici et là et qui en séchant créent des sortes de tumulus ou cratères. Tous ces amas sporadiques de matières picturales donnent naissance à la surface de la toile d'une topographie de type lunaire.

Le titre "Pig Iron" qui peut se traduire en français par la fonte obtenue par la fusion du minerai de fer dans les hauts fourneaux justifie le traitement pictural particulier appliqué à cette toile. Cleveland où vit le peintre était un centre industriel important jusqu'à la seconde moitié du XX° s. avant de connaître sa reconversion vers le secteur tertiaire (finance et assurances).

Ainsi Matthew Dibble a vécu une grande partie de sa vie environnée par cette industrie lourde et par l'intense activité déployée par les hauts fourneaux, aciéries et laminoirs qui faisaient partie de son décor quotidien. Et tout cela devait également lui inspirer certaines scènes de la mythologie comme les travaux de Vulcain, le dieu du feu.

De plus cette fonte obtenue par la fusion du minerai de fer lui-même extrait des entrailles de la terre nous fait participer à un spectacle comparable à la naissance du monde.

Les couleurs participent d'ailleurs à cet univers originaire par l'emploi de pigments plus sombres et plus mystérieux : une palette morne tirant vers le gris et le brun terreux. Mais également le vert qui surgit de la trouée centrale et un éventail d'autres teintes qui apparaissent par touches sporadiques mais sans apporter une réelle clarté à l'ensemble (le rose à droite, le bleu à gauche et d'autres nuances de brun, de rouge...).

En assombrissant la composition, la couleur participe à la rendre encore plus imperméable et plus compacte dissimulant également son animation intérieure.

Cet espace originaire peint par Matthew Dibble rappelle ce que disait Henri Maldiney à propos de certaines scènes peintes par Cézanne:

« Le schème sub-spatial de tout espace, le schème sub-cosmique de tous les mondes, c'est-à-dire une métaphysique de la profondeur » (Maldiney Henri, L'Equivoque de l'image de la peinture, Paris-Lausanne, L'Age d'Homme, 1973).

Effectivement comme Cézanne, le travail de M.Dibble ne suit pas l'itinéraire de l'illusionnisme académique, il se veut fondamental, réveille un chant endormi en tout chose, pour que l'œuvre devienne une sorte d'événement-avènement.

Déjà dans le fait de s'attacher à des thèmes mythologiques cela doit être compris chez M.Dibble comme une tentative de privilégier les questions universelles. Au plus profond de son œuvre se dissimule un ordre caché, l'espace s'ordonne malgré un désordre apparent selon une logique intérieure grâce à une animation interne et une architecture organique.

Dans toutes les grandes œuvres on découvre la même réalité comme le décrit notamment Ehrenzweig:

« L'attaque de la déraison contre la raison » et où paraît un ordre nouveau, « un ordre caché dans la structure de l'art ». (livre d'Ehrenzweig - l'ordre caché de l'art)

Rothko également pensait que l'art doit aller plus loin:

« L'amour de l'art est une "noce des idées » (...) le point crucial n'est pas pour nous l' « explication », mais la question de savoir si les idées essentielles que doit communiquer le tableau ont quelque importance. »

Il voyait dans son travail de peintre comme une force mystique à l'œuvre. Ainsi les expansions chromatiques, les surfaces de couleur, étaient douées selon lui d'une véritable puissance surnaturelle.

Et bien souvent pour arriver à ce point de non retour, il faut selon la formule du poète Henri Michaux « crever la peau des choses » et tout cela « pour revenir, selon mot de Husserl, aux choses mêmes. »

« Pig Iron » se présente comme la manifestation de ces mondes originaires, la fonte en fusion comme sortant directement des entrailles de la terre. Mais au-delà, le peintre nous renvoie à une réalité autre, celle d'un combat entre monde et terre, entre l'éclaircie et la réserve

Peintre de l'absolu, M.Dibble demande à l'art de lui révéler l'absolu de l'être. C'est pourquoi cette toile est ravagée par le trop plein de pulsions, la massivité, la débauche et la violence des touches pour provoquer violemment la matière afin qu'elle lui dévoile le caché, le non-dit.

Cette agressivité se manifeste notamment par ces gestes de libération sur la toile, par les lacérations du pinceau, du couteau de la spatule ou de la brosse. Le peintre semble se livrer au chaos des sensations, chaos qui fait chavirer les choses, donne l'illusion du mouvement en restituant en quelque sorte les ondes de choc du big-bang universel.

Comme Cézanne, il cherche en peinture l'organisation, le fondement des choses semblable aux assises géologiques du monde. Le maître d'Aix-en-Provence voulait un art du durable, du solide et était en quête permanente de l'aspect consistant et intemporel de la nature.

Ici par ce tableau qui est censé reproduire la coulée de la fonte à la sortie d'un haut fourneau, le peintre vise aussi à rendre la profondeur du fond où celle-ci surgit. Par équivalence avec l'être, il s'agit de restituer cette profondeur d'être.

Grâce à cette œuvre qui fait sourdre cette fonte en fusion, le peintre nous conduit à dépasser la simple expérience perceptive, pour la rajeunir constamment et devenir comme le troisième œil, une vision de portée métaphysique.

Cela rejoint l'analyse de Martin Heidegger qui considère que seule l'œuvre d'art permet le dévoilement de l'être.

« L'art fait jaillir la vérité. D'un seul bond qui prend les devants, l'art fait surgir en tant que sauvegarde instauratrice, la vérité de l'étant.
Faire surgir quelque chose d'un bond qui devance, l'amener à l'être à partir de la provenance essentielle et dans le saut instaurateur, voilà ce que nous signifie le mot origine. » (Origine de l'œuvre d'art de Martin Heidegger)

Curieusement cette révélation de l'être nous renvoie aussi à la Grèce antique, foyer de la mythologie qu'affectionne particulièrement M.Dibble. En effet un certain Parménide, qui est un philosophe pré-socratique disait déjà l'essentiel par ces quelques mots qui ont l'air tout simple: « l'être est; le non-être n'est pas ».

En disant ces quelques mots Parménide résume toute cette question de l'être qui selon Heidegger avait été oubliée dans l'histoire de la métaphysique. Mais pour le philosophe allemand, cet oubli de l'être n'est pas une simple négligence de la pensée, mais fait partie de sa structure même.

Pour lui la pensée occidentale ne laisse pas être l'être. Seuls les peintres et Cézanne notamment permettent véritablement de faire advenir la vérité de l'être des étants.

D'où cette fameuse déclaration de Cézanne: « Ce que j'essaie de vous traduire est plus mystérieux que tout. C'est l'enchevêtrement aux racines mêmes de l'être, à la source de l'impalpable sensation »

C'est pourquoi, au contact de « Pig Iron » on peut entrevoir cette éclaircie de l'être, en appréhendant l'œuvre d'un autre regard et éprouver cette impalpable sensation.

Metz, le 11 juin 2010.

Christian Schmitt

Christian Schmitt on Matthew Dibble's painting-"Wounded Wizard" (English)

2010-05-31T14:05:00.000-07:00

Wounded Wizard (oil on canvas) 91,30 x 75,20 cm, 2007.

« Wounded Wizard », this work, produced in 2007 by Matthew Dibble, an American painter from Cleveland, contains element of surprise.

It represents a human face that one could consider “prismatic” since one has the impression of seeing it at the same time straight on as well as in profile. In effect, juxtaposing the two sides produces a strange optical effect comparable to that of a prism.

Moreover, the face which appears on each side seems to be disfigured. On the left, its profile with one eye, a mouth askew, or really showing two, and then on the right a face with another eye, a nose,and another mouth...Obviously, all that indicates a certain discord: the simultaneous vision of two sides of a distorted face is particularly alarming especially because of the third part of this enigma which appears over the other two.

Happily, the head “unifies” the ensemble with a high, rounded forehead. The individual seems to be bald,
unless the two forms protruding behind the skull are in reality , the last two shocks of his remaining hair .

In fact, this strange character is not unique in the world of Matthew Dibble. For years, in his drawings and then in his paintings, this artist has been creating a pantheon of monstrous beings, often with a half-human-half bestial appearance, worthy of ancient mythology.

This is why one can affirm that this painter from Cleveland continues to some extent the work of the twentieth century surrealists . Following the example of Chirico, notably, Matthew Dibble shows us a haunted, foreboding work displaying disturbing forces.

All of that signifies the irruption of the unconscious which makes its theatrical entrance in this painting, and Matthew Dibble himself, supports this analysis by speaking of his work as a psychological painting in a recent email received on April 4, 2010:
“This painting is psychological...”

But this phenomenon is not new, since Marcel Duchamp had seen in Courbet, the father of the modern painters, the intervention of “the subconscious hand” and also quite evidently in the work of Matthew Dibble, where his work escapes pure reason.

Thus in his work, mystery takes shape, thanks to his personal style of presenting the human face by using distorted perspective or rather by inventing new perspectives, split in two or multiplied in the very style of Chirico. In so doing, he forces the laws of art, and offers not a superhuman image, but one which is “super humanized.”..!
As for Chirico, in justifying his style of painting, he did not hesitate to say:

“One must not forget that a canvas must always show the reflection of a deep feeling, and that “deep ” signifies profound or foreign and that “foreign” signifies little known or completely unknown. In order for a work of art to be truly immortal, it is necessary that it go completely beyond human limits. In this manner it will approach the dream of the childlike spirit.” (taken from his writings during a stay in Paris between 1911 and 1915.)

This is why, like Chirico, Matthew Dibble feels the need for going beyond to escape the anguish of modern man as well as to escape his own, personal anguish. This desire for going past the limits is going to take on his part, the road of the unknown through the creatures who populate his universe.

In that, he is also loyal to that which Nietzsche proposed as a new tension of consciousness and the unconscious.:

“With the strength of his intellectual vision and of his view of himself enlarging the distance and to some extent the space which surrounds man, the world becomes more profound; new enigmas and new images present themselves to his view.
Perhaps everything on which the eye of the spirit has exerted its sagacity and its profundity has been nothing but a pretext to this exercise; a game and a childish folly. Perhaps someday, the most solemn ideas, those which have provoked the greatest struggles and the greatest suffering , the ideas of «God» and of « sin » will have for us no more importance than children's toys and and childhood disappointments in the eyes of an old man.
And perhaps this“old man” does he still need another toy and another sorrow – feeling himself still enough of a child, eternally a child!” (Beyond Good and Evil, I.57)

This pessimistic account of modern man will serve to to drive him continuously to go beyond the norm without rendering himself truly happy since anguish will exist forever.
Consequently, to live, quite simply, he needs to come closer to the dreams and the spirit of a child.

On the part of Matthew Dibble, that will take the form of a particular attraction to ancient myths.
In that, he is also the disciple of a certain Jean Cocteau, the most famous contemporary mythographer. In order to justify his passion, Cocteau wrote in the form of witticism:

« I have always preferred mythology to history because history is made up of truths which become untruths in the long run and mythology is made of of untruths which become truths over time».

More seriously, Cocteau often used myths to help him to express the limits of the cognitive faculty of man and notably of the passage from the conscious to the unconscious (the enigmatic Sphinx of Thebes, for example).

But in reality, here, to call upon myths and mythology seems less operant. Indeed the man whom one sees in this work appears to be the painter, himself, and therefore, it would be about his own self-portrait.

Moreover the title, « Wounded Wizard » which can be translated into French as
« Le magicien blessé » gives us a primary indication.

In the aforementioned email, the artist had revealed “his wound “ in speaking of his work. According to him, he suffers from not being the artist that he would wish to be and constantly doubts himself and his work.

Furthermore, he is even more explicit in speaking of a painting of a psychological nature.
“ I suffer the fact that I’m not the man or artist I could be, that I can always be better.”

The image that he sends to us in this work is thus the result of the emergence of his subconscious into the painting. The disfigurement inflicted on its face goes a long way to attest more amply to that.

It is in the tradition of painters like Picasso who deliberately deformed the face and the body of their characters for the single goal of better understanding and feeling (sic) them .

Notably he painted Dora Maar as a woman crying, disfigured and hysterical, to announce a catastrophe or some situation of despair.

Other artists have worked in the same style: Dali by disfiguring in order to make a surrealist symbol of scorn and Francis Bacon who to better emphasize pain and sadness will use the face as a raw material. He will use it by destroying it to the extreme to produce a traumatic expression of horror.

In the same manner, expressionists such as Egon Schiele will also break down the human body leading to an expressive radicalness which is sometimes extreme (see his self-portrait)

And not forgetting also DeKooning,who in his series of portraits of Women uses this same process. His friend Barnett Newman justified this approach by stating n 1962:
“People were painting a pretty world but we realized that the world was not beautiful. The question, the moral question that we each asked ourselves—DeKooning, Pollock, myself—was to find out: What would be necessary to beautify it?”

Very fortunately, Matthew Dibble has no intention of beautifying the world nor of overshadowing his own torment. His anguish is perceptible in this work and it is recreated with much sincerity and a great economy of means. This minimalist work seems closer to a drawing than to a true painting.

The only colors : (white, black and shaded ocher) are used merely in the background and only to color the backdrop of the canvas. Just the black line gives life to this painting: true sculpted poetry recreated in terse, simple means!

Matthew Dibble perfectly masters the use of the line and succeeds particularly in tracing dark circles around the eyes to create a mood of profound concern or worry.
The internal fusion compensates for any apparent minimalism, thanks to the brush stroking which shows itself to be masterful.

The qualities of simplicity, precision, and lyricism, recreate a pure, clean image...but all is happily not explained or put forth in this work.
The painting « Wounded Wizard » still remains radiant with enigma!

Christian Schmitt, April 5, 2010
translation by Darlene L. Nelson

Smaller-scale drawings reveal artist's power of personality.

2010-05-20T13:23:00.000-07:00

Friday, January 20, 2006 Zachary Lewis Special to The Plain Dealer

Painting is Matt Dibble's claim to modest fame in Northeast Ohio, but it isn't his first love. Pencils, pen and ink were his tools well before brushes and oils, and they've never been far from his hand.
The drawings themselves have remained even closer. Ever since his days at Cooper School of Art, Dibble has tended to reserve his drawings exclusively for family and friends, insisting they were too personal for the general public.
But there was one friend who insisted on sharing. Christopher Pekoc, a prominent local artist and an art instructor at Case Western Reserve University, championed the drawings and convinced Dibble to exhibit them.
"The drawings have a basic power," Pekoc says. "They come from a place that's totally honest. The paintings, too, are impressive, but they don't pull me in the same way these strange figures do. The lines in the drawings are so sure, and the proportions are very attractive."
If Dibble was shy about his drawings, at least he didn't have to transport them very far. He found a willing venue directly across the hall from his downtown Cleveland studio: a new multipurpose gallery called Studio of Five Rings. Founded in October 2004 by Youngstown native Matt Cook, Five Rings does triple duty as a winery and a martial arts school.
It's not a large space. Pekoc had more than 100 drawings to choose from, but was forced to narrow the show down to 15 pieces. Each one of them, however, reveals an exceptionally confident hand. Faces, bodies and other shapes overlap in multiple perspectives in a way that recalls the cubism of Picasso. Yet their sparseness and bold outlines call to mind Chinese brush paintings. There are even traces of Surrealism in a stitching pattern Dibble occasionally employs.
Strangely, though, the drawings bear little or no resemblance to the rest of Dibble's vast output. In contrast to the paintings -- large, colorful abstracts -- the drawings are black and white and essentially figural. All but one are small, too, roughly the size of an average sheet of typing paper, while any one of the paintings alone could occupy an entire wall.
It's not immediately clear why Dibble sheltered this body of work from the public. There's nothing intimate about the compositions themselves, nor do their titles ("Pointy Idiot," "Without Fire," "Taller Every Second") give away anything particularly confidential.
Still, the artist had his reasons -- and pretty good ones at that. Dibble says all those fragmented figures represent various aspects of his personality, aspects that aren't necessarily flattering.
"I know that once people see these, they're going to come up with deep psychological interpretations about me," he says. "But the fact is, the spiritual, sacred things, always come to me at the oddest moments."

Claudio Parentela Interview: Matthew Dibble

2010-05-08T19:09:00.000-07:00

q) What is your earliest art-related memory?

In 1964 when I was seven years old I vividly remember seeing the Pieta by Michelangelo at the World’s Fair in New York and being overwhelmed.

q) Who has had the greatest influence on your work?

Working closely with students of the Gurdjieff Work.

q) What are the main tools of your craft?

Brushes and trowels.

q) Is a formal education important?

For me it was, I learned the value of good drawing in Art School.

q) What is the biggest misconception about art?

That it has any thing to do with natural ability.

q) Which is more important in art - concept or execution?

Too much mind can be an obstacle.

q) What theme or aesthetic are you most drawn too?

The painting are psychological, seeing my self as I really am- is difficult. Some times I have glimpses of larger possibilities. I examine through the figurative work a very rich inner life and am “surprised by joy” often in the studio.

q) What is your favorite piece of art in your home?

The best designed, most functional and use full sculpture in my house is the bathroom throne.

q) If you could collaborate with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?

A difficult question. I would like to have met Ian Curtis.

q) Which emerging artist do you think more people should know about?

There’s a very interesting Arts writer in France right now named Christian Schmitt.

q) What has been your greatest achievement to date?

In my early years I led an alcoholic life but in 1984 was given a reprieve. I’ve not had my sobriety interrupted for the last 26 Years.

q) What has been your biggest roadblock?

I suffer the fact that I’m not the man or artist I could be, that I can always be better.

q) How do you define success?

When you can look in the mirror and not be afraid of the man in the glass.

q) What will be the name of your autobiography?

Diary of an Amateur or Ego Without Substance

q) What is the best piece of (art-related) advice you’ve ever been given?

Each moment is a new opportunity, be attentive.

Matthew Dibble 5/6/10

Claudio Parentela:Campione delle arti

2010-05-08T18:41:00.000-07:00

www.claudioparentela.net

Born in Catanzaro(1962-Italy) where he lives and works…Claudio Parentela is an illustrator,painter,photographer,mail artist,cartoonist,collagist,journalist free lance,Tarotologist(Tarot and Psychic Readings)...Active since many years in the international underground scene.He has collaborated&he collaborates with many,many zines,magazines of contemporary art,literary and of comics in Italy and in the world...& on the paper and on the web...some name amongst the many:NYArtsMagazine,Turntable & Blue Light Magazine,
Komix,LitChaos,Why Vandalism,Thieves Jargon,180 Mag,Braintwisting,The Doors of Creativity Anthology,Lo Sciacallo Elettronico,Inguine,Stripburger,Lavirint,Komikaze, Mystery Island Magazine,Monoclab, MungBeing Magazine,The Lummox Journal,The Cherotic R(e)volutionary,Sick Puppy,Malefact,Gordo,johnmagazine, SHITTY SHEEP-Lamette, alchimiadeldolore,Be|Different, UpScene Magazine ,Chance,Lucid Moon, Tryst ,Carolina Vigna Maru’s Blog, Abusemagazine, hijacked, Synthesis, filosofem.com, Spartandog, Numbmagazine,DrexterMagz,Que Suerte,Art Life,Pintalo De Verde,ApArte,Evasion,The Benway Institute,Phony Lid Publications,First Class,This Is Magazine,Diesel,Stu Magazine, Becoming Journal , Exposweb, Pockoville,Crane Magazine,Staplegun, Zupi ,4x6-art, Funtime Comics,Untergruntblatte, lartmagazine, Passenger May, Sekushi , Onthecamper,Head Press,Entmoot, Lartmagazine,You&Me,Rorschach,Fagorgo,B.G.A.Comix,Tracce,Prospektiva,Balkan Spirit,Liberazione.net,Don Juan Online,Emozioni, Digitalabstract,Fatece Largo,Petrolio,Out Zine,Pssst Zine,Bolle Di Cartone,All About Fucking,Gibbering Madness,Rotkop,Anima Mal Nata,ZZZzine,Labour Of Love,Bianco D’Uovo,Bries,Ratriot,Kami Zine,Pus!,Bathtub Gin,Experimental Forest,Stardust Memories,Sunburn,Funtime Comics,Spaghetti,Plop,Topaz&Psichedelica,Joey and The Black Boots,Blind Man’s Rainbow,The White Buffalo Gazzette,Lore,Lunatic,Chamelon,Rigodor,Axolotl,Luca Bonanno Editore,Succo Acido,Pitchfork,Chainsmoker,Surface,Crimson Feet,Skyline,Re:Magazine,Oyster Boy Review,Anthology,Xero Magazine,Slic,Lit Pot Press, warmtoast cafe,Gumball Poetry,Mineshaft,Milk&Wodka,Yahoo Zine,Stardust Memories,CartaIgienica,Faestethic,Field Report,Out Of The Blue,Comfusion Magazine,Careful,Ellin Selae,Multistorey,Disegni Di Sogni,Omnibus,The Sound Projector,Gooch Magazine,Laugh Clown Laugh,Shift, Castlemagazine- WAMtv,Vial,Frior,Debilana,Cool Strip Anthology,Territory,Panik, weblog.bezembinder.nl,Celulit,Pimba,OtomanoProper Gander,Container,Mammamiaquantosangue,Cikuta,Traspiratore,Gambuzine,Empty Life,Erroneo,Kalte Tage,Planeta Underground,Cabezabajo, Poetexpress,Nexus,Criade,Love Eternal Lost Infernal,Algiza,Raven,A.K.O.M.,Mutate & Survive,Angelflesh Press,Skirocore,Sirota Jerica,Zone Optimiste De Bande Dessinèe,Breakfast All Day,The Brown Bottle,Crystal Drum,The Brobdingnan Time,Edgar,Il Foglio Clandestino,Microbe,New York Press,Something Else,O!!Zone,Vitriol,The Flashing Astonisher,Devil Blossoms,Contagio,The Dream Zone,Sinus,Yops Zine,Versus Press, lamoira. –ultrazine-graphola-tribenet-linarte-homme-moderne-furtherfield-globevisions-artbabyart- UpScene Magazine -zanzibart-braintwisting-arte.go-designradar-sitart-sciacalloelettronico-artfaq- Caveat Lector-lazaruscorporation-ionone-lospaziobianco-youandiproductions-artrenegades-artbureau-cimaisevirtuelle-americanspiritstudios-Choler Magazine-graphiland-artpoetryfiction-catalyzerjourna-ambulant-surfaceonline-lambiek-thebluesmokeband—equilibriarte-gumballpoetry-cafeshops-subtletea-vu gallery-silverfish-zeroboutique-mondocolorado-succoacido-artzar-unlikelystories-discord-aggregate-latchkey.net-bewilderingstories-artbarge-yokeandzoom-bhag.net-chaosgeneration-artgalerie34-lobstupidfish-netcells.net-thundersandwich-sensuoussadie-thepedestalmagazine- BecomingJournal- No More Flowers -Space Junkies Magazine-lucidmoonpoetry-ubq-plumrubyreview-komikaze-tattoohighway-Burrow Magazine-Swoon Magazine-artistswithoutfrontiers- WAMTV-...El Eros Incesante -thedigitalartist-doubledarepress-theaxis-cloudking-monkeyview- Y SIN EMBARGO magazine - Degrees of Separation- WeirdArt-drunkenboat-erreur404-bigbridge-monkeyview-opensewer-oysterboyreview-labisagra-Entero'ziNe-arti(e)rumori –botulinux-tenaviv-eternarte-fameweb-erbadellastrega-muse-apprentice-guild-dimensionearte-socialdesignzine-indiejournal- thanalonline-Rorschach-roxybar-genomart-spreadhead-duepunti- AnythingILike- LIFE DURING WARTIME- surreal collages-
-stategrezzi-agliincrocideiventi-stradanove-Tiscali Arte-hybridstudios-arthal-socialdesignzine-boxart-.eroxe-edizioniriccardi-art.e-zine-erroneo-SOGNOdiSEGNI 2002-clubghost-musicheart-linguaggioglobale- dwarfcadaver -actarus-xseven-whipart-girodivite-ideerandage-gordo.it-erbadellastrega-skorieindustriali-wema-Entero'ziNe-robotswillkill-omnisat-lucidmoonpoetry-H+Art-komikaze-hoardmag-phueydesign-Culture1.com-tattoohighway-arteutile-herecomethewilddogs-RetortMagazine- subculture-lovepain.com-showcomplex-lobstupidfish-wormwoodchronicles-ArtRemains-gallerythe-prettythings- artsingulier--dustydomino-halfempty- americanartists-cartaigienica-escualotis-artactif-webdesignersexperiments-outsiderink-pseudolo-samsara-strangedude-globevisions-lospaziobianco-yokeandzoom-cafeblu-casaditolleranza-equilibriarte-stickyourneckout- artrevolt project- Hugo Strikes Back!-botulinux-literarypotpourri-locomediadub-halfempty-Choler Magazine-Mistery Island Magazine-inkpots-artisticdevil-lamette-studiocleo-lovepain-tribenet-inguine.net-Hermatena-prosetoad-stickyourneckout-pickwick-samsara-artfaq-rorschachonline-arte.go-jamcafe magazine-locomediadub-Animals in Mailart –roxybar-Arts Ablaze Gallery –Filosofem-enfusemagazine-sensuallogic-phirebrush-millenniumartgallery-dork magazine-galleryculture-Escáner Cultural-digitalconsciousness-Arts Ablaze Gallery –mousikelab-fameweb-socialdesignzine-theshowingplace- warmtoast cafe-gumballpoetry-invisibleinsurrection-hybridstudios-digizine-charnwood-arts-surface-wiredheart-poemus-artrenegades-mindcaviar-succoacido-gallerythe-Vulcanoidi- The Lamp-Araba Fenice -net-art-artetop-guzzardi.it-mentalcontagion-furtherfield-catalyzerjournal-Cristian S. Aluas CSA Books-Lummox Press/Journal-lovechess-americanspiritstudios-Mashnote Magazine ...- ANIMAL magazine- Wicked -TheArtSource- Not The Tate, gallery- nonzi-escmagazine-graphiczone-theamericanskin-undergroundxchange-Silent Presence Gallery-publiceyesore-locusmag-Unwound-cartaigienica-Buiten Westen -armando adolgiso.it-artdish-the-vu-BATHTUB GIN -JHON magazine-bonobo-galleryculture-linguaggioglobale-progettobabele-subsystence-samsaraquarterly-traspi.net-arteecarte-galerieserrano-vicodelferro-woesteweduwe-dimensionearte-braintwisting-topolin-prospektiva-placesofart-falsestart-GLUBIBULGA' -arti(e)rumori –cafepress-annotazioni-electronic-art-edizioniriccardi-ilbolerodiravel-subculture-arthal-sitart-citizen32-paroladidonna-lilacedius-essendemme-inguine.net- DarkArtists-tangents-cimaisevirtuelle-riflessioni-jackmagazine-Exquisite Corpse -obscurity . webzine -UBQ | Leave Your Fingerprint-Rivista Anarchica Online-bedfordnovel-poemus-Tiscali - Arte-wormsarts-atopiaonline-dorkmag-digizine-pigmag-outsiderink-ROJO®magazine –doubledarepress-redfoxpress-HOARD MAGAZiNE -NoTxt Magazine -filtered-magazine-Arts Ablaze Gallery –thewissahickon-doubledarepress-hoardmag-thundersandwich- rockheals-CimarronReview-charnwood-arts-jackmagazine-madhattersreview-Whalelane- BoundlessGallery-oysterboyreview-thewissahickon-invisibleinsurrection-aliens-cafe-masthead-ambulant-roxybar-blank-magazine-funtime.comics- ConArt-lovechess-zafusy- P.F.S.-bigbridge- EOTU Ezine - OK ARTE-SpokenWar- Bant Magazine-Hybrid Studios-lunaticchameleon-fearsmag-Mashnote Magazine –fifthstreetreview-locusmag-theaxis-XERO Magazine-litvision-inkpots-ESC! Magazine ––Animal Raw Art- Spent Meat- artbarge-buitenwesten-artuindenfair-youandiproductions- ionone-takingitglobal-thepedestalmagazine-Half Empty –iconique-smallspiralnotebook- Transmission Magazine-sidewalkpoetry-vialmagazine-peaceseed-monophobic-thepoisonedapple-two-zero-Exquisite Corpse –kenagain-HEAD magazine-zerooneart-virtuallyinfamous-BATHTUB GIN - Illustrationmundo,Gambuzine-tenthousandmonkeys-CHANCE MAGAZINE-channel83.gallery-soupskin.- spreadhead- thelemming-prettythings-funhousemagazine-gallery-21-leportillon-raggededgepress-Bonobo galerie –hexvalue-netcells-retortmag-crystaldrum-locomedia-cafepress-Tokyo Cow-kufia-Crack! Fumetti dirompenti -Corps Possibles - Identités Possibles-retortmag-artrecess-johnmagazine-Tiscali - Arte-Roxy Web - Arte-biographic.ubq-deliriohouse-indiejournal-Outsider Ink-latchkey-poopsheet-lamoira-tribenet-linarte-homme-moderne-globevisions-artbabyart-zanzibart-arte.go-sitart-sciacalloelettronico-pseudolo-illu-station-botulinux-lazaruscorporation-lospaziobianco-Federico Feroldi Arte Contemporanea-rockheals-cimaisevirtuelle-americanspiritstudios-Choler Magazine-The House of Tate-artpoetryfiction-otro.it-Outsider Ink-Cimaise Virtuelle -GQ-La Tora Web-Mutate&Survive-Doodlers Anonymous-latchkey.net-Mashnote Magazine –Anteism-vorticeargentina-spreadhead-indiejournal-3rdthought-edificewrecked-galerieserrano-sugardrum-curiousculture-wrath.de-Magpie Magazine-Lazer ArtZine-DoDmag-Dark Sky Magazine,Paraphilia Magazine,New Chemical History,Cut-click Magazine,Dirt Cheap Magazine,GOB Magazine,Bedlam Magazine,Platform58e-zine,MetaCreativemagazine,TrustMe Magazine,BAIAANG*,AndIStillMissYou,(Cirkumfleks) Magazine
,glassesglasses,Supernova Magazine,dximagazine ...
…etc…etc…and the list could continue again a long time…
During the 1999 he was guest of the BREAK 21 FESTIVAL in Ljubliana(Slovenja)...
...His obscure&crazy artworks are present &shown in many,many art galleries in the endless web...and then again at ’’GIRASOLE’’(Villa Basilica),at ’’TABULA RASA’’(Barcellona),at Vahagnartgallery ,at ‘’GALERIE SLAPHANGER’’(Amsterdam),at ‘’La Casa Di Tolleranza’’(Milan),at’’La Cueva-No Art Gallery’’(Milan),at Spazio Aurora(Milan),at Forte Prenestino(Rome),at Andenken Gallery(USA),at’’ HOEPLI INTERNATIONAL BOOKSTORE EXHIBITION SPACE’’(Milan), at Skorie Industriali(Rome),at theMUKY(Faenza), in Turin with the Association’’Mind The Gap’’,at The ‘’Pina Gallery’’(Koper),al ‘’Diesel Gallery’’(NY),at the ‘’METAVERSO’’(Rome),at the''Virtual Shoe Museum'',,at ‘’Little Cakes Gallery’’(NY),at the’’Interzona’’(Verona), at ’’Trainside Gallery’’(Haverhill,USA),at ‘’Blah Blah Gallery’’(U.S.A.),at ’’Scaremongering Gallery’’(USA),at ‘’Sage Club’’ (Berlin),at ‘’Panda Club’’ (Pistoia),at Creativa2006(Rignano sull’Arno-FI-Italy)),CAM_Casoria Contemporary Art Museum(Casoria,NA,Italy),at ‘’Cultural Association EKIDNA(Carpi-MO-Italy)- at Glowinski’s' Library(Olesnica-PL), ‘’Da Marisa Gallery’’XM 24(Bo-Italy),’’ Blog on Arthur Rimbaud’’ 2 shows at the Castello di Rivara, near Torino ,and at the the San Carpoforo church, place of the Accademia d’Arte di Brera in Milano, at ‘’Tenax’’ (Firenze),at ‘’Teatro Studio’’ di Scandicci (Firenze),at the Libreria Segnalibro of Ferrara(with the show’’Tarocchi Evoluti’’organized by the Associazione Hermatena),at ‘’Ambasciata di Marte (Florence)’’,at ‘’Klyk’’ (Firenze), at ‘’The Wurst Gallery’’(Portland-U.S.A.)- at Red Labels(Toronto-Canada), at Centre for Graphic Arts HogeDRUKgebied(Rotterdam-NL), at Galerija DLUM(Maribor-SI), at ’’Achab’’(Catania) and at all the other sicilian stops of the show’’SognoDiSegni’’,at Artitude Gallery(Paris),at ‘’Zo Cafè’’(Bologna),at the show'' the show''CHILDREN NO MORE''(Bari-Italy),''at the Barcode(San Benedetto del Tronto-Italy),at Circolo Culturale Bertold Brecht(Milano-Italy), NO.HUMAN.NO.CRY(Monza-IT), at Atkinson Art Gallery ( Southport UK),at’’ DYNAMO’’ (Milano-Italy),at the show’’Arredi Digitali’’in San Benedetto Del Tronto and at the shows that GRAPHOLA has organized and continues to organize...at’’Leave Your Fingerprints’’ organized by the friend Mimmo Manes&UBQ,at ‘’ Fira Magica de Santa Susanna’’(Spain),at''GUAPOPO Gallery''(Spain),at’’Sechiisland's Micro Gallery’’(Brasil),at ‘’Museum of Porn in Art’’(Zurich),Cranky Yellow(Saint Louis, MO-US),at''Hoody Art Gallery''(London-UK),at’’Black Maria Gallery(LA-USA),at’’Third Drawer Dawn(Australia),at"Green Art Fair Miami 08",at 3rdthought, at ''Umber Studios''(Minneapolis-USA),,at''Zoccoletti e Zoccolette''(BIOKIP GALLERY @ Pervinca OpenSpace-Milan-It),at ''The Woom Gallery''(Birmingham-UK)-SPAZIO ARKA(Assemini centro (CA)),''SUBject Festival''(Bologna-It),CeC 2009 Uttarakland (India),at ''I MALEDETTI DEL ROCK ITALIANO''(Palazzo del Podestà,Città di Castello-IT),''Human Emotion Project''(Brancaleone,Rome It),''Ocho Delicate Nature''(Milan-It),''Ocho global group exhibition & book''(Barcelona-Spain),at the ''Mezzanine''collective show curated by Chillin's Productions(San Francisco-U.S.A.),''®out 3ª Mostra Internacional d'Art Urbà Publicitari''(Barcelona-Spain),''Inspiration Art Exhibition 3''(Tel Aviv-Israel),at''Phobia''collective show at the''Gallery'101'(Kaunas-Lithuania),at the''#2AdunanzAutogestitArtisti''(CasalBertone -Rome-IT),at the ITALIAN INSTITUTE OF CULTURE(London-UK),at''Juessey Art Gallery(Njardvik Reykjanesby-Iceland),at''EMERGENZAarte''(Villa Farsetti_Santa Maria di Sala_Venice-IT),at ''EART(h)EART(Italy),at''Galleria Derbylius ''(Milano-IT)...and again..and again to other ...He does a lot of mail art and he partecipates to all the mail art projects he knows...
...He has collaborated and he collaborates with many bands of industrial music,noise,experimental&electronic,harsh&death&metal gore...punx....
...He has illustrated poems and stories&music of Gavin Burrows,Harry Wilkens,Vittorio Baccelli,Claudio Morici, Alberto Rizzi,Cristiano Quadalti,Shannon Colebank,Gary Sneyd,Robert Smith,Michael Kriesel,Mark Sonnenfeld,Nathan Medema,Richard D.Houff,...drawn together for&with Maurizio Bianchi M.B,Elvi Athan,Marcel Herms,Kapreles...
...for various publishers he has realized some booklets of illustrations and comics:’’Il Ratto Bavoso’’,and’’L’Incubo Dimezzato’’(Innovation Studio-B.G.A.Comix-Italy);’’Fashion Robot’’(David Lasky-Seattle-USA),’’L’Agnello Sacrificale e la Salamandra Impiccata al Patè 666’’(Medicina Nucleare-Italy);’’Storie’’(Progetto Siderurgiko-Italy),’’Eudemoni’’and’’Piccola Trilogia Nera’’(Poems of Alberto Rizzi and of Cristiano Quadalti with Claudio Parentela’s illustrations -Criatu Prod.-Italy);’’Jeanne Dark You Got Balls’’ and’’The Frogs’ Ballet’’(Self-produced);’’Black Kisses and Other Stories’’,and ‘’The Book Of Secrets’’(La Cafetiere Editions-Belgium);’’Endless Tongue’’(texts of Richard D.Houff and Claudio Parentela’s illustrations -The Benway Institute-USA),’’Else Beds’’(Claudio Parentela’s illustrations and poems of Nathan Medema-JesusBunny Press-Canada);’’The Savage Soldier’’(Luca Menichini Prod.-Italy);’’Derrumbe’’( Valter Casini Ed.-Italy),’’Matter Ballet’’(Claudio Parentela’s illustrations and poems of Michael Kriesel-BoneWorld Publishing-USA),’’Social Reform’’(poems of Shannon Colebank and Claudio Parentela’s illustrations-Whizzbanger Prod.-USA);’’Le Miopi Della Montagna’’(Underground-Press-Italy).''The Weak Cuckoo''(Gran Negro Publisher-Spain).…He has drawn 2 tarots for’’Tarocchi Evoluti’’(published by Associazione Hermatena-Italy)...and always Hermatena Publishers has published my last and new tarots' deck''I Tarocchi dell'Iride''...
and on the web he is present on many pages and in many places again...

Radawec show is fun and smart- L. Kent Wolgamott

2010-05-08T05:22:00.000-07:00

"We're Not in Kansas Anymore" is, of course, one of the most famous lines from "The Wizard of Oz." It's also now the title of an intriguing, highly entertaining Project Room exhibition by Bill Radawec that uses the film as a launching point for its series of tiny tableaux set in small wooden boxes.

Populating the tableaux are "little people," a takeoff on the Munchkins from Oz. But it's not the Frank Baum story or its filmed version that fascinates Radawec. Rather it is the tales of debauchery by the Munchkins at the hotel where they were housed during the filming of the movie that has drawn his interest.

Whether those tales of orgies and drunkenness are true is beside the point - Radawec's narratives in a box mix fact and fiction, blending references to real people and events (including the Parma, Ohio, artist himself) with imagined occurrences.

The narratives take place in a series of small, smoothly sanded wooden boxes, no more than 5 or 6 inches long, 2 or 3 inches wide and about 3 inches deep. Viewing the handpainted "little people" (actually HO model train figures) and their constructed world comes from above - which means you have to get next to the work and to the wall to see inside.

The world they inhabit is primarily the art world, specifically galleries where work is on display and a very odd mixture of patrons is doing all sorts of things in the space around the art.

One tableau, for example, finds a busty woman in a Santa outfit sharing the space with an Orthodox Jewish man and a monk in a robe. What would bring such a group together and what are they doing? That's left to the imagination of the viewer, but the juxtaposition of the "people" and what they represent is all Radawec.

Even stranger is a scene in which a man is holding a woman hostage with a gun pointed at her head. In front of them stands another female figure, lifting her shirt to flash her breasts. The questions of what is going on, etc., in that little grouping are heightened by another, more practical query: Who knew that model train figures were so violent and sexual?

A couple of the boxes make direct references to contemporary artists. One reproduces in tiny fashion the giant butterfly paintings of Damien Hirst, a very tempting target. There's a man being videotaped there - perhaps a shot at the publicity-obsessed Hirst - along with a trash bin (more commentary?) and, at the end of the tiny gallery, a naked man and boy and a chimpanzee. You figure it out.

Another box makes a nod to Richard Prince, a man on a horse galloping through the space referring to his Marlboro Man series, while Radawec reproduces his own work in two of the tableaux.

Those tiny blue- and- white "contrail" paintings were part of "Act or Observe," a January show at Project Room. While they could be random views of the jet contrails against the sky, they are based on the turnaround of United 93 above Parma on Sept. 11, 2001 - another story in an exhibition full of stories.

Even the boxes themselves are art references - first to Donald Judd in their smooth-surfaced minimalism, then, in a way, to Joseph Cornell, who filled boxes with complex imagery. Radawec, however, adds narrative that wasn't presented by either Judd or Cornell.

"We're Not in Kansas Anymore" also includes three laminated wood "drawings" that mimic the boxes and, thereby, emphasize the minimalist connection and some "studies" for the boxes that remove three of the four sides to place a figure against a wall.

While they're likely necessary for Radawec to figure out how to place the little people and small paintings, the studies feel like architectural models and almost detract from the boxes because they contain no narrative or visual challenge.

Even so, "We're Not in Kansas Anymore" is an exhibition that is as entertaining as it is challenging, both fun and smart, and, if you get all the references, a good-natured critique of the art world that comes out of "The Wizard of Oz."

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 402-473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com

Douglas Max Utter, Man of Letters.

2010-05-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

Doug's lucid and thought full art criticism in Cleveland and beyond could never be replaced and needs support right now.
As an artist in Cleveland I feel fortunate to have had such a world class and witty examiner write about my work. But most of all, I enjoyed the insights he gave me when writing about other Cleveland artists and galleries.

He has been tireless, accurate and sometimes sly while keeping this record of the Cleveland art scene alive.

Let’s not look back at his body of work and say “wow” but lend him our support and appreciation now. An extraordinary writer is in our midst, let’s let him know about it.

Matt Dibble 5-3-10

Douglas Max Utter was educated in part at Case-Western Reserve University, 1974-5, and has been self-employed as a writer and exhibiting artist since 1986. At various times he has taught painting and drawing courses at the University of Akron(1997-98), Kent State University (2001-2), and Cleveland Institute of Art (2003).

He was co-Founder and sometime editor of Angle Magazine (2003-2007), managing editor of Artefakt Magazine (2004-2005) and from 2005-2008 organized shows and publications as Exhibitions and Collections Coordinator for the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve. He began writing criticism and commentary on the arts in 1988. Since 2006 he’s written weekly reviews and commentary as art critic for Cleveland Scene Magazine (formerly the Free Times), winning awards from the Cleveland Press Club, and over the years have received two Fellowships in the area of art criticism from the Ohio Arts Council, plus one in painting. He has written several hundred reviews, articles, and catalogue essays.

Interview with Douglas Max Utter -Claudio Parentela

2010-04-21T16:08:00.000-07:00

http://elvisinh.blogspot.com/

q)Let’s start with the basics; what's your full name, where do you live, and how old are you?

a)Douglas Max Utter

q) Do you have any formal training?

a)Some. I had several tutors as a teen. Does teaching art count as formal training? I think it should – I learned a lot from it. I’ve taught 1st and 2nd year drawing and painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art and as part of an MFA program at Kent State University, and also Advanced Painting to fourth year students at Akron University. I’ve also done a great deal of research over the past 20 years for reviews and essays I’ve written about visual art for various magazines, newspapers and museums. All these things have made a gradual difference in the way my work is focussed.

q) Did the place you grew up in influence your image making?

a)I think so. I started painting landscapes in England, near Oxford where I lived for a year when I was a boy. A little later I did some plein aire painting far to the west of Cleveland, in the corner of Iowa where my grandparents lived. Farms and abandoned buildings attracted me, and then derelict city scenes. Recently I revisited some of those subjects in a series of memory paintings and rainy cityscapes, following my mother’s death.

q) How do you come up with your concepts?

a)I sometimes paint scenes from my dreams, or from folklore or traditional biblical subjects. But even in those paintings most of my imagery is based on photographs, either news photos or my own. I don’t use actual photos as part of the physical work of art, but “draw” them in various ways, with spray paint or tar or black pastel. Conceptual content tends to grow out of the imagery and materials, not the other way around – I’m interested in the role of intuition as an agent of psychic expansion. I’m equally intrigued by the phenomenon of “presence.” I look for combinations of subject and technique that generate a sense of surprise, such as might be experienced when encountering another person in a dark room.

q) Describe your creations in a clear, concise and understandable sentence. What do you call them?

a)I call them “expressive.” I look for parallels between found imagery such as news photos, and deep psychic structures, and for techniques and materials that can serve as passageways between these.

q)What other mediums would you like to explore in your image making?

a)I’m planning some installation and video work that will incorporate painted imagery.

q)What is the best time in the day for you to work on a project? Is there one, or is it more about the environment -- maybe the right mood?

a)Whenever I have the time and the studio is warm enough. But I also work at home, usually on the dining room table, making a big mess, usually during the day because the light is better. I try to ignore my moods.

q) What are your artistic influences?...and …generally who or what influences you the most?

a)El Greco, Rembrandt, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Milton Avery, Picasso, Willem DeKooning, Francesco Clemente, Gerhardt Richter, Frank Auerbach, R. B. Kitaj. Some of these were very early, like Picasso, and others like Frank Auerbach I first became aware of after I made work that connected with theirs – after which I began to integrate aspects of their thinking with my own. There’s a lot of give-and-take in art making, I think. I also feel there’s often a particular painting I’ve encountered in the past, somewhere under each of my own works, secretly moving and motivating its imagery and technical tendencies. Sometimes I suddenly become aware of it – like, “O, it’s a Vuillard!”

q) Who are some of your favourite artists/designers/photographers?

a)Lucian Freud, William Kentridge, Marlene Dumas, Fabian Marcaccio, Julie Mehretu, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Amy Casey, Kasumi (video artist)

q) What is your next project?Exhibition?Collaboration?

a)Two retrospective exhibitions (which will include some new painting), one in May at the Asterisk Gallery in Cleveland, the other at The Art Seen, a converted movie theatre in Vermilion, Ohio on display Jume 1 – August 31.

q)What are your plans for the future?

a)I am very bad at plans. I hope to reinvent myself several more times.

q)Are there some web sites that You would like to recomend? Artists, art communities, xx,...!?

a)Amy Casey has a delightful website – www.amycaseypaintings.com, and my good friends, Matt Dibble – www.dibblepaintings.com, and Randall Tiedman – www.randalltiedman.com and there are other links on my website: www.douglasutter.com

q)What sort of music do you listen to?

a)I’m a big fan of classical music, especially J.S. Bach and Dmitri Shostakovitch, but also a million other composers and much contemporary music. Funk revival like Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings delights me, as well as the original R&B and Soul sounds, like the O’Jays, Bill Withers, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations. And Tom Waits, Radiohead; so many things.

q)Do you collect anything?If so what?

a)Not really. I have a bunch of brown and white Staffordshire chinoiserie-type platters and plates from the 19th century, and old books, and a few dozen paintings and prints by my friends.

q)What do you do for fun?

a)I walk or go to movies or kiss someone, or play with my daughter’s cat Spanky. And I love to travel.

q)Any advice you can pass onto aspiring artists/designers?

a)Let yourself be guided by your passions and by people who appear in your life.

q)Your contacts…

a)Are very disorganized...I don’t have a coherent list at the moment

74th Midyear Exhibition at the Butler Institute of American Art, Judge-Ronnie Landfield

2010-04-13T05:59:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to have this painting included in the 74th Midyear Exhibition, opening June 27th at the Butler Institute of American Art. Judged by Ronnie Landfield

The Butler Institute of American Art, located on Wick Avenue in Youngstown, Ohio, United States, was the first museum dedicated exclusively to American art. Established by local industrialist and philanthropist Joseph G. Butler, Jr., the museum has been operating pro bono since 1919. Dedicated in 1919, the original structure is a McKim, Mead and White architectural masterpiece listed on the National Register of Historic Places .

To see Ronnie Landfields paintings www.ronnielandfield.net

WOUNDED WIZARD de M.DIBBLE by Christian Schmitt

2010-04-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

Wounded Wizard ", cette oeuvre réalisée en 2007 par Matthew Dibble, peintre américain de Cleveland, a de quoi surprendre.

Elle représente un visage humain que l’on pourrait qualifier de " prismatique " puisqu’on a l’impression de le voir à la fois de face et de profil. En effet en se juxtaposant, les deux côtés produisent un étrange effet d’optique comparable à celui d’un prisme.

Par ailleurs le visage qui apparaît sur chaque côté semble être défiguré. A gauche son profil avec un œil, une bouche de travers voire deux et ensuite à droite sa face avec également un œil, un nez et une autre bouche…A l’évidence tout cela provoque un certain trouble : la vision simultanée des deux côtés d’un visage disloqué est particulièrement angoissante d’autant qu’une troisième partie de ce puzzle semble apparaître en dessous des deux autres ?

Par bonheur la tête " unifie " le tout avec un front haut, bombé. L’individu semble être chauve à moins que les deux formes repliées à l’arrière de son crâne ne soient en réalité que les mèches de cheveux qui subsistent encore ?

En fait ce personnage étrange n’est pas unique dans l’univers de Matthew Dibble. Cet artiste a depuis des années imaginé et créé par ses dessins et ensuite par ses peintures un panthéon d’êtres monstrueux avec une apparence souvent mi humaine et mi animale dignes de la mythologie antique.

C’est pourquoi l’on peut affirmer que ce peintre de Cleveland continue en quelque sorte l’œuvre des peintres surréalistes du XX° s. A l’exemple d’un Chirico notamment, Matthew Dibble nous montre une œuvre hantée et prophétique où se déploient des forces inquiétantes.

Tout cela signifie l’irruption de l’inconscient qui fait son entrée en scène dans cette peinture. Et Matthew Dibble lui-même conforte cette analyse parlant de son œuvre comme d’une peinture d’ordre psychologique dans un courriel récent du 2/04/2010 : " This painting is psychological… "

Mais ce phénomène n’est pas nouveau puisque Marcel Duchamp voyait déjà en Courbet, le père des nouveaux peintres, l’intervention de la " main subconsciente ". Et bien évidemment aussi chez Matthew Dibble où son travail échappe à la pure raison.

Ainsi dans son oeuvre, le mystère prend corps, grâce à sa façon personnelle de présenter ce visage humain en utilisant les troubles de la perspective ou plutôt en inventant des perspectives nouvelles, dédoublées, multipliées à la façon de ce même Chirico.

Ce faisant, il force les lois de l’art, en donnant une image non pas surhumaine, mais surhumanisée … !

Quant à Chirico pour justifier sa façon de travailler, il n’hésitait pas à dire :

" Il ne faut pas oublier, qu’un tableau doit toujours marquer le reflet d’une sensation profonde, et que profond signifie étrange, et qu’étrange signifie peu connue ou tout à fait inconnue. " (Selon ses écrits pendant son séjour à Paris en 1911-1915)

Afin qu’une œuvre d’art soit vraiment immortelle, il est nécessaire qu’elle aille complètement au-delà des limites humaines. De telle façon, elle s’approchera du rêve et de l’esprit enfantin.

C’est pourquoi comme Chirico, Matthew Dibble ressent de manière similaire ce besoin de dépassement pour échapper à l’angoisse de l’homme moderne ainsi qu’à sa propre angoisse. Et ce désir de dépassement va prendre chez lui les chemins de l’étrangeté par les créatures peuplant son univers.

En cela il est fidèle également à ce que suggérait Nietzsche comme une tension nouvelle de la conscience à l’inconscient :

" Avec la force de son regard intellectuel et de sa vision de lui-même grandissant la distance et, en quelque sorte, l’espace qui s’étend autour de l’homme. Le monde devient alors plus profond, de nouvelles énigmes et de nouvelles images se présentent à la vue. " (Par-delà le Bien et le Mal, I.57)

Peut-être tout ce à quoi l’œil de l’esprit a exercé sa sagacité et sa profondeur n’a été qu’un prétexte à cet exercice, un jeu et un enfantillage. Peut-être, un jour, les idées les plus solennelles, celles qui ont provoqué les plus grandes luttes et les plus grandes souffrances, les idées de " Dieu ", du " péché ", n’auront-elles pour nous pas plus d’importance que les jouets d’enfant et les chagrins d’enfant aux yeux d’un vieillard.

Et peut-être le " vieil homme " a-t-il besoin d’un autre jouet encore et aussi d’un autre chagrin – se sentant encore assez enfant, éternellement enfant !

Ce constat pessimiste de l’homme moderne va le conduire en permanence au dépassement sans le rendre réellement heureux puisque l’angoisse existera toujours. Par conséquent pour vivre tout simplement, il a besoin de s’approcher du rêve et de l’esprit enfantin.

Chez Matthew Dibble cela prendra la forme d’un attrait particulier pour les mythes anciens.

En cela il est aussi le disciple d’un certain Jean Cocteau, le mythographe contemporain le plus célèbre. Celui-ci pour justifier sa passion écrivait sous forme de boutade :

" J’ai toujours préféré la mythologie à l’histoire parce que l’histoire est faite de vérités qui deviennent à la longue des mensonges et que la mythologie est faite de mensonges qui deviennent à la longue des vérités ".

Plus sérieusement Cocteau utilisait les mythes pour l’aider à exprimer souvent les limites de la faculté cognitive de l’homme et notamment du passage du conscient à l’inconscient (l’énigmatique sphinx de Thèbes par exemple).

Mais en réalité ici, faire appel aux mythes et à la mythologie parait moins opérant. En effet l’homme qu’il est donné de voir dans cette oeuvre semble être le peintre lui-même et par conséquent il s’agirait de son propre autoportrait !

D’ailleurs le titre de l’œuvre elle-même " Wounded Wizard " qui peut se traduire en français par " Le magicien blessé " nous donne un premier indice.

Déjà dans le courriel précité, l’artiste nous avait révélé " sa blessure " en parlant de son œuvre. Selon lui, il souffre de ne pas être l’artiste qu’il voudrait être et doute constamment de lui-même et de son œuvre.

Plus loin il est encore plus explicite en parlant d’une peinture d’ordre psychologique, " car moi-même tel que je suis j’ai du mal à me comprendre ".

L’image qu’il nous renvoie dans cette œuvre est donc bien le résultat de l’émergence de son inconscient dans la peinture et par ailleurs les défigurations infligées à son visage vont l’attester plus amplement.

Il est dans la tradition des peintres comme Picasso qui délibérément déformait le visage et le corps de ses personnages dans le seul but de mieux les connaître et les sentir (sic).

Ainsi notamment il peignit Dora Maar en femme qui pleure, défigurée et hystérique pour annoncer une catastrophe ou une situation de désespérance.

D’autres artistes ont travaillé de la même façon : Dali par la déformation pour en faire un symbole surréaliste moqueur et un Francis Bacon qui pour mieux nous faire ressortir la douleur va utiliser la figure comme un matériau brut. Et il va s’en servir en la détruisant à l’extrême pour produire une expression traumatique de l’horreur.

De même les expressionnistes comme Egon Schiele vont aussi déstructurer le corps humain aboutissant à une radicalité expressive parfois extrême (voir son autoportait).

Et sans oublier également De Kooning, qui dans sa série de portraits des Femmes, va utiliser ce même procédé. Son ami Barnett Newman justifiait cette démarche en déclarant en 1962 :

" Les gens peignaient un joli monde mais nous nous sommes aperçu que le monde n’était pas beau. La question, la question morale que nous nous posions chacun – De Kooning, Pollock, moi-même – était de savoir : que fallait-il enjoliver ? "

Fort heureusement Matthew Dibble n’a nullement l’intention d’enjoliver le monde ni d’ailleurs d’occulter son propre tourment.

Son angoisse est perceptible dans cette œuvre et elle est restituée avec beaucoup de sincérité et une grande économie de moyens. Cette oeuvre minimaliste semble plus proche d’un dessin que d’une véritable peinture.

Les trois seules teintes (le blanc, le noir et l’ocre nuancée) ne sont utilisées qu’en arrière-plan et seulement pour colorer le fond de la toile. Seul le trait noir donne vie à ce tableau : véritable poésie plastique restituée en peu de moyens !

Matthew Dibble maîtrise parfaitement le trait et réussit notamment en traçant quelques cernes autour des yeux à créer une atmosphère de profonde inquiétude.

La condensation interne compense cet apparent appauvrissement grâce à ce passage du pinceau qui se veut virtuose.

Les qualités simplicité, précision et lyrisme restituent une image pure et nette…mais tout n’est pas heureusement expliqué et donné dans cette œuvre.

La toile " Wounded Wizard " reste toujours vibrante d’énigmes !

Christian Schmitt, le 5 avril 2010.

Jeffry Chiplis: Neon Works in the 21st Century.

2010-03-24T15:13:00.000-07:00

Jeff Chiplis exhibition opens at the Butler Institute of American Art -March 21st thru May 9th 2010
Jeffry Chiplis: Neon Works in the 21st Century
Jeffry Chiplis was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He earned a B.F.A. in Sculpture at Indiana University after which he moved to Cleveland, Ohio. He has presented his neon sculpture to critical acclaim at the White Box Gallery in New York City, and has shown in the Cleveland Museum of Art's NEO show. Mr.Chiplis was an artist in residence at the Dilna Symposium in Mikulov, Czech Republic.

Meet the artist March 21st from 1pm to 3pm

Location: Beecher Center - Youngstown

The Beecher Center, housed in the south wing of the Butler's Youngstown location, is the first museum addition dedicated solely to new media and electronic art. The facility regularly displays works of art that utilize computers, holography, lasers and other digital media. The Beecher Center houses the Zona Auditorium, a digital media theater designed for performance art and high-definition film presentations.

Visit the Butler The Butler Institute of American Art
The Beecher Center
524 Wick Avenue
Youngstown, Ohio 44502
Phone 330.743.1107

Matters of Taste- An era of intrigue at Kenneth Paul Lesko Gallery.

2010-03-24T15:04:00.000-07:00

By Douglas Max Utter

Modernism 1927-1970 Through April 3 Kenneth Paul Lesko Gallery 1305 W. 80th St. 216.631.6719 kennethpaullesko.com

It would be no great surprise to find a retail showroom like the Kenneth Paul Lesko Gallery tucked away on a chic block in London, New York or Chicago. But the Lesko enterprise, operated by Kenneth and his son Ross, waits for customers at the end of a corridor in a rambling brick structure that once housed the American Greetings complex on West 78th Street.

Not that it's alone; other galleries and studios dot the building's erratic floor plan, including several of Cleveland's longest-running businesses specializing in contemporary art. But the Lesko Gallery has its own big-city flavor, featuring cultivated enthusiasms, art-historical insights and an elusive quality that used to be called "taste." If that sounds snobbish, maybe it is. But the Leskos themselves aren't. The discrimination they cultivate translates into an unselfish commitment to the artistic vision of groups like the Cleveland School, which is well-represented in their inventory. Other areas of the Leskos' eclectic expertise include vintage Italian art glass and tribal sculpture.

For three decades, the Cleveland family conducted business on the road. That's the way much of America's fine-arts market operated throughout the past century, presenting work at annual fairs and sales events. Much of it still is. New York, Chicago and Miami — and to a lesser extent, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco — are America's art poles, both as homes to permanent galleries and as hosts to international shows like Art Basel Miami Beach, New York's Armory Show and Art Chicago. Ross says most of the family's clientele was New York-based, but he remembers trips to more obscure venues as well, to places like Minneapolis, Dallas and Denver.

Now rooted on Cleveland's west side for six years, the Leskos are developing a client base one customer at a time. "We weren't sure how our aesthetic would match up with the market," says Ross. "It's an experiment."

In the meantime, the gallery mounts offbeat shows of considerable interest. Culled from an extensive inventory, the exhibit Modernism 1927-1970, on view through April 3, consists of about 30 oil paintings, watercolors and sculptures by European and American artists.

There are no famous artists here, but name recognition isn't the point: Some are so obscure that even the spelling of their names is a matter of speculation. That's part of the fun. Ross calls their paintings "mystery" works, and his face lights up as he talks about them, recognizing affinities and stylistic elements that point to a given time period. What does matter is an indefinable something that tugs at the unconscious. The viewer's role is to be tuned in enough to respond to the strangeness, as well as the artistry, of this content.

"It's almost forensic," says Ross of this process. Inspiration, talent, history and personality haunt the gallery walls, asking to be known. The same could be said of the gallery itself.

Christian Schmitt on Matthew Dibble

2010-03-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

A 52 ans, Matthew Dibble peintre de Cleveland OH a déjà atteint une maturité exceptionnelle dans son art autant par la qualité de ses dessins que par sa peinture.

Certes il se considère avant tout comme un dessinateur (il dessine depuis l'âge de 13 ans !) et c'est d'ailleurs grâce à ce don précoce qu'il nous fait entrer dans un monde étrange digne de la mythologie peuplé d'êtres venus d'ailleurs.

A la frontière de l'animalité et de l'humanité, l'univers vivant de Matthew ressemble à celui de Jean Cocteau qui lui aussi a emprunté certaines figures de la mythologie avec notamment Orphée et Œdipe. A l'époque de la sortie de la pièce de théâtre « Œdipe », Colette écrivait un article prodigieux d'intelligence à son ami Cocteau en ces termes : « Où va ce novateur ? Au passé. Au fabuleux mythologique, au classique merveilleux. Il s'élance à rebours. Il retourne vers Orphée, vers le Sphinx. Vers ce qu'il a peut-être connu ... ? ».

Matthew reprend d'une certaine manière le même flambeau en réactualisant dans son panthéon personnel les mythes anciens. Il exhume par ses dessins (et aussi ses peintures figuratives) les formes étranges et énigmatiques de ces êtres sortis tout droit de notre inconscient collectif, lui-même hérité du passé ancien ou mythologique de notre humanité.

Ce faisant il nous révèle avec beaucoup de force et de conviction les peurs et les angoisses ainsi que les espoirs qui collent à notre humanité.

La peinture (abstraite) est venue plus tardivement chez Matthew et il ressent toujours les vagues hésitations d'un débutant, estimant parfois que ce mode d'expression est trop exigeant pour lui. Voici d'ailleurs ce qu'il déclare lui-même :

« J'essaye de me débarrasser de mes a priori pour ne pas tomber dans la routine car je possède le coup de main alors que j'ai besoin de découvrir quelque chose de nouveau. Comment mettre plus de sentiments dans mon œuvre ? Suis-je honnête dans mon processus créatif ? Cela m'amène à des questions plus importantes: qui suis-je, puisque je suis ici ?

Mon œuvre est en fait le résultat de ce que j'ai toujours pratiqué: le dessin. A l'âge de 13 ans, j'ai dessiné à l'encre de Chine en plongeant le pinceau dans l'encrier. J'étais fasciné par le trait en utilisant toujours ce même matériau.

Quand la peinture est trop exigeante pour moi, je retourne au dessin. J'ai toujours pensé que ce que je représente dans mes petits dessins est plus fort que dans mes grandes toiles.

J'ai continué à peindre et à dessiner et les surfaces de mes peintures sont devenues assez intéressantes mais il leur manque quelque chose, une qualité dans les dessins que je ne trouve pas dans les peintures.
Ce n'est que récemment que je suis capable de transposer les dessins dans les peintures les plus grandes. »

Le critique d'art Douglas Max Utter juge quant à lui le travail pictural de Matthew Dibble dans la continuité du chemin tracé par Cézanne jusqu'à De Kooning. Voici ce qu'il déclare notamment :

« Pour un peintre comme Dibble qui s'est intéressé aux tensions des travaux contemporains de l'œuvre de Cézanne jusqu'à De Kooning. L'activité centrale de son art consiste dans une chorégraphie très intense consistant à mêler ces deux peintres qui paraissaient incompatibles, très éloignés l'un de l'autre.

Ces figures ou ces paysages ou animaux fantastiques, mythiques sont rendus dans un style graphique simple et direct qui rappelle les esquisses attirantes, très puissantes, de vigueur de Matisse ou de Jean Cocteau de la vie des cafés de Paris.

Les nouvelles peintures telles que "Year Without a Summer" et "Chinese New Year" parviennent à capter l'espace pictural ...des lignes noires exécutées avec une grande précision. Une série de colonnes verticales qui se détachent dans une œuvre récente appelée "Bushwhack".

Devant ces choses, des lignes qui évoquent une scène de la mythologie.
Au centre, il y a une tête qui se détache le grand corps épais d'une bête dont les jambes qui se terminent en appendice et qui ressemblent à des pieds. On trouve d'autres figures réparties sur l'ensemble qui peut ressembler à des paysages. Un effet comme une vision de constellations inconnues. »

En accord avec Douglass Max Utter, je pense également que Matthew Dibble est dans la continuité de ces deux illustres prédécesseurs.

Comme De Kooning la figure reste toujours prépondérante chez Dibble et comme lui, il ne considére jamais l'abstraction comme une fin en soi. Par référence aux "Femmes" de De Kooning, Dibble développe pour sa part le thème de ses êtres étranges avec la même cruauté et lucidité que son illustre prédécesseur. Et puis cet investissement du corps dans le processus de création nous amène à des rapprochements troublants entre ces deux peintres.

Enfin la manière de Dibble de travailler la peinture dans ses œuvres abstraites nous fait penser autant à Cézanne qu'à De Kooning : il est dans la tradition de l''Action Painter : « l'acte de peindre est de la même substance métaphysique que l'existence de l'artiste » comme le disait le critique Harold Rosenberg et plus loin aussi : « la nouvelle peinture a aboli toute distinction entre l'art et la vie ».

Enfin la palette lourde et épaisse utilisée par l'artiste rappelle le travail de Cézanne dans sa période couillarde mais également à l'aube de sa vie lorsqu'il annonçait prophétiquement les premiers balbutiements de l'abstraction et du cubisme !

Le témoignage de Matthew Dibble intitulé « Artist Statement » ainsi que le commentaire de Douglas Max Utter seront reproduits ci-dessous en anglais.

Text in English

The testimony of Matthew Dibble entitled "Artist Statement" and the commentary by Douglas Max Utter are reproduced in English.

Artist Statement By Matthew Dibble

Making a statement about my painting doesn't feel authentic to my experience as an artist. Sitting here drafting this view I'm thinking about what I want to say about my work. This also doesn't feel related to my experience.

Can it be said I am an artist when painting but other times, no? I see I've been led to a question. When am I an artist? An artist question seems more appropriate at this time. The creative process puts me in question. When I begin to work, the first thing I see is how lazy I am, and how weak my attention is. I see I want to fall back on old tricks, things I know that will make a successful painting. But I'm trying to discover something new.

So I begin to let go of my old ideas, my habitual way of doing things, my grasping approach. I notice another part of myself, a quieter part. Instead of trying to make something happen, I try to allow more of this part to surface.
I'm very much interested in this process, not necessarily to make a good picture but to

discover something new. How can I bring more feeling to my work? Am I being honest about my experience as a painter? This questioning process leads to bigger questions such as who am I and why am I here?

My current work is very much related to something I've been doing for a long time-drawing. As far back as I can remember, I would draw pictures. Somewhere around the age of thirteen, I began to draw with India ink, dipping the pen into the ink jar. I was endlessly fascinated with the line and continued to draw using these materials to this day.

When painting seemed too demanding, I would draw. I always felt that the imagery and scale of my smaller drawings was stronger than in my larger work. I continued to paint and draw, and the surfaces of my paintings became quite interesting but somehow they lacked something, a quality the drawings had but I could never transfer to the paintings.
I stayed with it for over 20 years, and recently have been able been able to use the compositions from the small drawings successfully in the larger paintings.
(http://www.dibblepaintings.com )

The Persistence of Matt Dibble August 30th, 2006
By DOUGLAS MAX UTTER

For a painter's painter like Dibble, versed in the tensions of modernist work from Cezanne to DeKooning, the central activity of his art is to choreograph an ever more intense dance involving these two eternally incompatible partners.
The long stretch of art practice is something like dreaming. It takes place as much in the mind as in the studio, and time travel is commonplace.

In recent large paintings on canvas, Dibble returns to themes and techniques that have preoccupied him since the age of 13, when he began a series of small line drawings. Those involved fantastic people and animals, mythic in feeling and rendered in a simple, uninflected graphic style reminiscent of Henri Matisse, or Jean Cocteau's vivid sketches of Paris café life.

New paintings like "Year Without a Summer" and "Chinese New Year" are mostly about wrapping the pictorial space in a maze-like warp of precisely executed black lines.

A tightly packed series of bluish vertical columns form a background grid in another recent work titled "Bushwhack." Flickering in front of these are lines that evoke a mythological scene. Toward the center a head is flung back along the broad body of a beast whose legs terminate in hoof- or foot-like appendages. Other faces hover, upside down or sideways, among marks that could represent landscape features. The total effect is like a vision of unknown constellations, mapped across swathes of a digitally cloned sky.

(http://www.dibblepaintings.com )

Painting is Back

2010-01-29T17:19:00.000-08:00

Painting is back
by William Chill

The weekend of Jan. 15th was another busy one for art around the Westside with the opening of the faculty show at BAYarts and the quarterly open house at The Studios at 78th Street in the Gordon Square Arts District.

I taught a painting class at BAYarts years ago and have watched the momentum that the venue has been gaining of late, and the current faculty show exemplifies this new energy. Included in the show were some nocturnal landscapes by Jeff Yost that dance the line between realism and abstraction.

The distinctive colorful landscapes of well-known Bay resident and artist, Mary Deutschman, were also included, as well as a mix of photography, watercolors, collage, and jewelry. There was an assortment of media on display representative of the wide range of talents from the BAYarts teaching faculty.

After leaving the BAYarts show, I took the easy coast down Clifton Avenue to the Studios at 78th Street (where I just recently moved my own studio), to catch the final hour of their open house.

The building’s owner, Dan Bush, just carved up five new artist studio spaces in the massive brick building, which used to be the American Greetings building from a previous era in the city’s history. The outside of the building still appropriately bears the ghost image of the painted banner, “Creative Studios.”

Inside, the place buzzed with a comfortable rhythm of art-goers and art-makers. After working my way through the studios and galleries, I lingered a bit at the Kenneth Paul Lesko Gallery, where this father-and-son team travels the world in search of quality painting. If you are a fan of painting, you will always be pleasantly surprised at what you can find hanging on their walls. What I like most about their approach is that they acquire paintings of quality, independent of the artist’s reputation or resume. In this regard, you could even say the Leskos are to painting what Robert Parker is to the world of wine.

My last stop was at Tregoning and Co. to see what dealer Bill Tregoning had in store. As I walked past Bill’s office I saw local Ab-Ex stalwart, Matt Dibble, sitting in Bill’s office engaged in a conversation with Bill and a couple other folks. As I went in to talk to them, I wasn’t sure if I was intruding in on a private club, or a kind of secret backroom, but I knew I had an admission ticket as soon as I saw Matt stand up to shake my hand. Whew.

Within the art world, artists, dealers, and buyers often exist in different orbits, and when their worlds intersect it could be a kind of quantum soup (think of the shy and inarticulate Jackson Pollock at a dinner party of New York socialites). Matt Dibble was dressed in paint-spattered jeans, black work boots, and a denim jacket over a blue hooded sweatshirt, topped off by a black knit watch cap. He looked like he just came from his studio over on Superior Avenue.

We talked a little bit and Matt was pleased to hear that I just moved my studio here to 78th Street. According to Matt, this building was definitely committed to painting, and I made a good move to relocate here. It seemed Tregoning, Lesko, and Scheele – the three anchor galleries here – had an appreciation for painting and a reputation of bringing in the buyers and collectors.

“Abstract painting is coming back,” Matt quipped, with a chuckle. We both spent a few minutes musing about conceptual art, installations, and other such contemporary works along the lines of resin dripping from a bucket attached to the ceiling while a video streams an image of a woman painting her toenails. Those genres can be engaging and thought-provoking but who can resist the authentic pull of painting?

Could it be that the nostalgic re-birth of painting can occur right here in rust-belt Cleveland? I don’t just mean painting, but painting – serious, intense painting in the spirit of DeKooning, Pollock, Gorky, and Kline. The current state of artistic self-absorption which is Chelsea and SoHo eliminates that from happening there.

It only seems right that painting like that finds its second wind in a town that was the home to the Hulett ore unloaders and a grid-work of urban-industrial patterns that mimic the harmonic rhythms of painting. New York may not know it yet, but painting is coming back and, in our work boots and coveralls, we’re bringing it back.

William Chill lives in Bay Village.

The Best of Times

2009-12-30T20:28:00.000-08:00

The Best of Times
Grants and galleries made 2009 an exciting year
by Douglas Max Utter
Two steps forward, one step back — or maybe one step forward, two steps back. Cleveland's homegrown visual-arts scene dances a dysfunctional tango with local galleries dipping and swooning in response to what is unavoidably a marginal market. Ability and enthusiasm are never in short supply, but the reality for local artists is that money usually comes from elsewhere.

From that point of view, 2009 was better than most years, despite general economic woes. Tobacco-tax dollars earmarked by voters for the arts were distributed through the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. The $20K Creative Workforce Fellowships included 20 for visual artists living in Cuyahoga County. Such funding is without parallel in Ohio, and rare anywhere. It remains to be seen whether the county's generous stimulus initiative will drive growth, but it sends a convincing message of support to the arts community and makes it possible for a few artists to take time off from their day jobs. The result just might be more and better art, and deeper roots for the arts.

One CPAC Fellowship recipient (and winner of the 2009 Cleveland Arts Prize as Emerging Artist) was Tremont's Amy Casey, whose paintings of billowing masses of urban real estate lassoed in midair has won her national attention. MOCA Cleveland and Arts Collinwood both hosted mini-shows of her acrylic-on-paper images this year, giving Clevelanders samplings of the work that's impressing audiences in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Maybe the fellowship money will help to keep her here.

Like Casey, life-long Collinwood resident Randall Tiedman is featured in the latest Midwest edition of New American Paintings. The Cleveland State University Gallery and Arts Collinwood both presented shows of Tiedman's large, darkly Miltonic landscapes. His work is on view through January 10 at Ursuline College's Wasmer Gallery in a two-person show he shares with the powerful, versatile Patricia Zinsmeister Parker.

Cleveland's off-again, on-again gallery scene seemed stuck in the "on" position through much of the year. Several newer spaces like Front Room Gallery and Legation Gallery kept their doors open, while a hardy species of native gallerist enjoyed a growth spurt. In fact, many of the top stories of the year were about both artists and the galleries where they showed.

Thirty-year veteran Bill Tregoning opened a dramatically attractive new space at West 78th Street Studios, where he mounted two noteworthy exhibits. His Chris Pekoc/Night Visions examined the origins of Pekoc's stitched collages in his airbrush paintings from the 1970s. In a similarly analytical vein, Tregoning's Matt Dibble Paintings and Constructions took a thoughtful look at an important Ohio painter's work, contrasting recent abstract constructions with figural reveries from Dibble's construction-trade-oriented studio practice. Also at West 78th Street, Bill Scheele of Kokoon Arts Gallery extended his own three-decade career, showing complex works by Seattle-based Mexican-born artist Alfredo Arreguín.

William Busta continued to mount significant shows of some of the area's best artists at his two year-old space downtown. Strong solo shows by Cecelia Phillips, Hildur Asgeirsdóttir Jónsson, Douglas Sanderson, Stephen Yusko and Lorri Ott demonstrated the vitality and continuity of a diverse group of mid-career artists living and working in the region.

Gallerists who have achieved a level of real maturity over the past several years include artist/entrepreneur Dana Depew of Asterisk, internationally noted architect Robert Maschke and his 1point618 Gallery, Brett Shaheen with a national and international focus at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary, and Bonfoey, Cleveland's longest-running commercial space. Among the standouts were Craig Kucia's hallucinatory yet painterly oil-on-canvas works at Shaheen, John Pearson's installation of subtle, harmonious 3D works at 1point618 and Depew's yearly salute to Bernie Kosar, 19 — an engaging salon made up of 19 established and emerging artists.

Meanwhile the city's contemporary art museum, nonprofit galleries and educational institutions endured, providing a different sort of backbone for the community. Headed by SPACES and MOCA Cleveland, the list isn't long, but it's not getting any shorter, and that's a kind of triumph. The Cleveland Sculpture Center, Zygote Press, the Cleveland Artists Foundation, the Cleveland State University Art Gallery, Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, the Cleveland Institute of Art and Arts Collinwood all offered great shows.

There's also a new kid on the nonprofit block, the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory, which opened in 2008. One of 2009's most memorable events was the Morgan's summer show, War as Art/Art as War. Organized by Combat Papers of Vermont, it showed prints and other works made from paper produced from pulped combat uniforms. Most of the images were made by artist-veterans of Iraq and other wars involving American armed forces. The show's objective was to recycle and redeem trauma, reclaiming damaged psyches. Surely art has no more valuable or higher function.

arts@clevescene.com

Accidental Art Festival

2009-10-02T05:40:00.000-07:00

Cleveland's art galleries have created an accidental art festival
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
October 02, 2009, 12:01AM
Cleveland artists love to complain that the city lacks a robust gallery scene and that good work never gets the attention it deserves.

Uh, sorry, that's not the case at the moment. The city's nonprofit and commercial galleries are knocking themselves out this fall, in the middle of a recession, to pay homage to scores of Cleveland artists. At this very moment, half a dozen key venues are showing more than 250 works by 100-plus local artists in shows that are selective, well focused, well organized and well worth seeing.

It all amounts to a virtual festival of Cleveland art. The problem is that the wave of shows is the result of individual, uncoordinated, go-it-alone efforts. You don't see any fliers proclaiming the event. But the lack of collaborative marketing shouldn't prevent us from appreciating the moment.

The accidental Cleveland art festival of 2009 includes more square footage of exhibit space and more art by blue-chip local artists than the Cleveland Museum of Art was ever able to cram in its once-vaunted May Show exhibitions. In fact, it's as if the May Show were happening all around us, right now.

Consider:

Through Jan. 10, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is showing a handsome exhibition on the Op Art paintings of Julian Stanczak, who, at age 80, ranks as one of the most important artists in Cleveland's history. The show captures the joy Stanczak finds in making precise geometric abstractions that tingle the eye with scintillating colors and vibrant patterns of line.

Through Saturday, Oct. 10, the Cleveland Institute of Art is holding its annual faculty show. This year's version is a lively one, with roughly 100 works by 43 artists. Highlights include Bill Brouillard's "Guns and Religion" installation of terra-cotta tiles molded in the shape of handguns, and the "Metaphoric Garden" sculptures by Barbara Stanczak (the wife of Julian Stanczak), in which the artist carved chunks of orange, translucent alabaster into abstract shapes resembling large, fleshy flower petals.

Through Saturday, Oct. 24, the Sculpture Center is displaying a fine retrospective on the work of its founder, David Davis, who died in 2002 at age 82. With more than 30 works from the 1970s through the 1990s, the exhibition makes the case that Davis was better at fashioning smaller, domestic-scale abstract sculptures than the larger public works installed around the city and close-in suburbs. Influenced by Russian Constructivism and the biomorphism of Jean Arp, Davis worked in a manner that was both rigorous and intuitive, combining gentle, organic shapes with folded and perforated planes, and sticklike linear frameworks.
The Cleveland Artists Foundation, through Saturday, Nov. 14, is celebrating its 25th anniversary with an exhibition of 56 works by 38 artists from its permanent collection, including excellent paintings by Elmer Brown, Viktor Schreckengost, Frederick Gottwald, Henry Keller and Paul Travis. The selection, accompanied by a handsome catalog, is a typically impressive effort for a small but important institution that deserves more attention than it receives in its location at the Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood. The foundation, with more than 3,000 works in its permanent collection, should strike out on its own someday -- the sooner, the better.

Through Sunday, Oct. 25, the Cleveland Arts Prize is celebrating its 50th anniversary year with an exhibition of more than 40 works by 14 prizewinners, including Judith Salomon, Laurence Channing, Christopher Pekoc, Brent Kee Young and Linda Butler. The works on view, all selected by the artists themselves, are for sale, with proceeds to be split 60-40 by the artists and the nonprofit arts prize organization.

In two weeks, Bonfoey Gallery will salute Kent artist Joseph O'Sickey, 90, whose colorful garden scenes, still life and circus pictures take inspiration from the loose brushwork and joie de vivre of Henri Matisse. That show will run from Friday, Oct. 16, to Saturday, Nov. 28.

Steven Litt, The Plain DealerBiomorphic and geometric sculptures by David Davis are on view at the Sculpture Center's 20th anniversary salute to its founder.In addition to these shows, other notable displays of local art this season have included the recent posthumous retrospective at the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve on the career of Phyllis Sloane, who died in May in Santa Fe, N.M., at age 87. The show closed Saturday after an all-too-brief 10-day run. Sloane was known for tranquil still lifes and portraits of women in domestic settings, which she organized with bright areas of flat color and superb passages of drawing.

On top of that, the Cleveland Museum of Art's new East Wing features two new galleries devoted to Cleveland art, the first displays of their kind in the museum's 93-year history. One gallery focuses on 13 works by a dozen artists from the first half of the 20th century, including Charles Burchfield, Margaret Bourke-White and Hughie Lee-Smith. The other gallery features a mini-retrospective on the ceramics of New Jersey artist Toshiko Takaezu, who was born in Hawaii in 1922, and who taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art for nearly a decade starting in 1956.

Through Saturday, Arts Collinwood, at 15606 Waterloo Road, is showing an exhibition of dystopian urban landscapes by Randall Tiedman and somber, richly painted images by Douglas Max Utter.

Over at the Cleveland State University Art Gallery, 2307 Chester Ave., an exhibition of photographs of new urban landscapes in Turkey, by assistant professor Mark Slankard, is on view through Saturday.

Through Saturday, Oct. 31, Malcolm Brown Gallery in Shaker Heights is showing art quilts with African-American themes by Carolyn Mazloomi of West Chester, Ohio. Though not a Northeast Ohioan, Mazloomi is an important figure statewide.

At the William Busta Gallery, an exhibition on surreal sculptures and assemblages by Lorri Ott, a 2004 master-of-fine-art graduate of Kent State University, is on view through Saturday.

Taken all together, it's a season with a high percentage of thoughtful solo exhibitions and retrospectives, mixed with strong group shows and exhibitions of historical material covering a century of visual creativity in Cleveland. With everything that's on view, the key challenge is realizing what's out there, and taking the time to see as much of it as possible. Next year, if all the venues that focused on regional art this fall in such a broad way could draw attention to their efforts collectively, we might have a real Cleveland art festival instead of a virtual one.

Show Review

2009-08-29T18:20:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-08-19T20:15:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-19T16:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Ingenuity Festival 2009

2009-07-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

July 15, 2009 Arts » Arts Features
HOMESTYLE TINKERIN'
Ingenuity gathers the family around
by Michael Gill
Ingenuity organizer James Levin predicted that Ian Charnas' production Boltz — a campy mix of musical theater, dance and electrical tinkering presented by Case Western Reserve University — would be the iconic event that people remembered from Ingenuity 2009. Hopefully that's not true. The production's music and dance weren't badly realized, and the sustainability message was just about right for an after-school special or a comic book, but the science failed to impress. The electrical spark that was to be the centerpiece just didn't measure up.
Nonetheless, this year's edition of Ingenuity — and even the anticlimactic Boltz — captured the spirit of the festival's name more than previous installments. Roaming the whole scene, Melissa Daubert's horse on wheels amused festgoers with its shaggy fur and whimsical gait as it rolled with electronic clippity-clop accompaniment. It wasn't high-tech but undeniably mixed imagination with mechanics more sensibly than the high-tech, high-concept installations that have attempted to capture audiences' attention in previous years.
The art and high-tech concept is traceable to Richard Florida's book The Creative Class, which argues that software engineers are artists too. But Florida was trying to attract people to cities, not build an arts festival to enhance a city. In that regard, this year's less glitzy, lower-tech Ingenuity Festival was more successful than previous ones.
Cleveland talent ruled. Local bands like the punk-, new wave-, and noise-influenced girl group Hot Cha Cha and the experimental pop trio Mystery of Two rocked the scene not as filler, but on the main stage during prime time Friday night. Original music is a kind of ingenuity Cleveland can understand. And who are we kidding if we're trying to promote Cleveland as an arts destination if we don't celebrate our own?
A festival highlight was Asterisk gallerist Dana Depew's exhibit of work by 50 regional artists, including Scene art critic Douglas Max Utter, Dan Tranberg, Amy Casey, Matt Dibble and many others who showed their work in a building slated for demolition. Depew's work isn't high-tech, but his adaptive re-use of light fixtures, door peepholes and other domestic gadgetry is not at all short on ingenuity.
Next to one of his pieces, Dibble left a handwritten note instructing festival organizers to leave one of the works hanging so it could be demolished with the building around it. There's something endearingly Cleveland about that.
In the All Go Signs Alley, Chuck Karnak featured a collection of Cleveland painters, including the Sign Guy, whose ingenuity is to make his mark on the city with goofy, hand-painted signs chained and bolted around town. If graffiti is like tattoos on the landscape, his work could be considered its jewelry.
Ingenuity doesn't have to go high-tech or import high-concept headliners to live up to its name. It's unfortunate that finances are what drove programming this way. But here's hoping that no matter how the money shakes out, the festival continues to show off Cleveland — and that crowds are interested enough to keep coming back.
mgill@clevescene.com

Tregoning and Company

2009-07-15T17:12:00.000-07:00

Cleveland Shakespeare Festival, Satchel Paige bio author and artist Matt Dibble are in the Critic's Circle
by Plain Dealer Entertainment Editors
Sunday July 12, 2009, 12:01 PM
Cleopatra (Carly Germany) smiles on Antony (Brian Pedaci) in "Antony and Cleopatra."
THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE FREE
Sometimes. Exhibit One: The Cleveland Shakespeare Festival has begun its 12th season of trekking about Northeast Ohio, bringing the Bard to audiences in the great outdoors. Theater critic Tony Brown caught a matinee of "Antony and Cleopatra" recently and notes that strong performances help ensure that it's "one of the best entertainment bargains of the summer." In repertory with "The Winter's Tale" weekends through Sunday, Aug. 2. For a schedule, go to cleveshakes.org.
Larry Tye
Exhibit Two: Baseball has not beenn very, very good to us this summer, but if you're still hooked on the sport, you'll want to meet Larry Tye, author of the nifty new biography "Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend," a profile of Satchel Paige. Book editor Karen R. Long calls Tye's 2004 "Rising From the Rails," about Pullman porters, "a gem of history writing." Tye will be reading from and signing "Satchel" at 7 p.m. Thursday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 24519 Cedar Road (Legacy Village), Lyndhurst. Call 216-691-7000.
Exhibit Three: Matt Dibble has been quietly making a body of work over the past decade or so from his studio on the near East Side, exploring a range of styles from Picasso-esque neo-Modernism to three-dimensional pieces that mix painterly craft with sculpture. Now he's ready to stake his claim with the exhibition "Matt Dibble: Paintings and Constructions" at Tregoning & Co., 1300 West 78th St., Cleveland, on the edge of the Gordon Square Arts District. Call 216-281-8626 or go to tregoningandco.com. Again, free is the word.

Equipping the Shop For Action

2009-07-07T10:24:00.001-07:00

Yankee in the Basement

2009-06-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

Issue Date: July 2009,

A Work of Art

After eight years, Dan Bush has turned 78th Street Studios into an arts mecca for Cleveland’s West Side.
Beth Troy
When Dan Bush received the keys to 78th Street Studios a week after his wedding, his vision for the building didn’t really extend beyond pitching ivy removal as an ideal honeymoon activity to his new wife. But eight years and four dumpsters of ivy later, he has successfully helmed its transformation into a thriving arts center that anchors the west side of the Gordon Square Arts District.

“I am crazy about the arts,” Bush says. “I believe they are a huge component of our neighborhood and a great contributor to what will happen in its renaissance.”

In 2001, Bush didn’t even own any paintings. He credits 78th Street’s creative ghosts — the building housed the creative headquarters for American Greetings throughout the ’70s and ’80s — and the small contingent of artists who initially occupied the building as catalysts for its transformation.

The building’s high ceilings, abundant windows and seemingly infinite space —actually 170,000 square feet, an artist’s architectural manna — beckoned to him. It wasn’t long before Bush traded mundane superintendent duties for customizing suites for creative businesses, including studios, galleries, auctioneers, recording facilities and editorial headquarters for a national magazine.

“As far as aesthetic goes, I build to suit, because otherwise, I am just creating a vanilla box. I want businesses to come to a space that’s cool, fun and well-built, with a design sensibility,” Bush says.

The result is a maze of eclectic spaces where curved drywall intersects brick walls and the cool hues of galleries contrast with the bright tones of their neighbors’ studios and offices. The art at 78th Street Studios reflects the diversity of the suites, and visitors can expect pieces that run the gamut from photography to paintings, classical to modern, still lifes to live performances.

Bill Scheele, owner of Kokoon Arts Gallery and tenant of three years, appreciates that the design is an extension of the culture at 78th Street Studios.

“That’s what interested me in the building: the diversity of creative types doing a lot of different things,” Scheele says.

The tenants officially convene quarterly for open-house receptions to exhibit their work to the public, but they regularly tour clients through the spaces and support each other’s ventures with the galleries cooperating to raise awareness of art. This symbiotic dynamic attracted Hilary Aurand to the space several months ago to partner with her husband, John, in Legation, an art and music gallery.

“We saw just this huge opportunity to collaborate with the businesses operating out of this place,” she says. “It’s encouraging to me as an artist to see all of these artists working together and making money.”

At 85 percent capacity, 78th Street Studios is no longer a well-kept secret, and Bush often brainstorms ideas to use the remaining empty square footage to bring resources to the artists, such as a library, photography studio or administrative office. Even a wine or coffee bar where the artists could commune or take their guests would be a welcome addition.

“Some of the best days of my life are when I am at events in this neighborhood,” Bush says. “You are standing around with other people enjoying being here and thinking this is the best place to be.”

Visit 78th Street Studios this month during its open house, July 10 and 11. For more information, visit 78thstreetstudios.com.

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Tregoning and Company

2009-06-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

Matt Dibble-Painting and Constructions opens July 10th 2009 at Tregoning and Company.

Christopher Pekoc

2009-06-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

Cleveland Arts Prize Winner Christopher Pekoc visited my studio and selected ink drawings for the show opening at Asterisk Gallery August 14th 2009.

Asterisk in August

2009-06-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

Asterisk Gallery Proudly Presents:
“Equipping the Shop for Action”
New Works by Matthew Dibble
With drawings selected by Christopher Pekoc

This exhibition is a series of paintings and drawings that concern the artists search to discover something new and a response to conditions in the studio

Opening reception Friday August 14, 2009, 6-11pm
on Sat Aug 15 at 4pm join us for an Artist Exchange
with the following panelists:
Christopher Pekoc- cleveland arts prize winner.
Douglas Max Utter - nationally known painter and writer.
Jeffrey Chiplis -certified barbecue judge and carrot king.
2393 Professor Ave. in historic Tremont
330-304-8528
www.asteriskgallery.com
Show runs through Sept 5
hours by appt.
Special thanks to Mark and Bruce Schantz for guiding me in the study of shop maintenance.
"How nice-to feel nothing and still get the full credit for being alive”.
Kurt Vonnegut-Slaughterhouse Five

Marks Obiturary

2009-06-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

Mark Putnam Schantz, 58, passed on peacefully with his loved ones surrounding him on June 13, 2009. His mantra at the end of life was open your heart. Those who survive him, and whose hearts are filled with him, include beloved wife, Lee Nielsen, daughters Kate and Jessa, sons Erik and Jon Schickedanz, sons-in-law Dick and Michael, daughters-in-law Ruth and Cheree, and grandson Henri Erik. He is also survived by a bounty of adoring family and friends: mother Grace, siblings Anne and Mark Perlmutter, Victor and Darlene Schantz, Jack and Marsha Schantz, Jill and Terry Frank, Ted and Jennifer Schantz, and Peter and Danni Schantz. He was doting uncle to Sarah, Emily, Betsey, Joe, Mary, John, Becca, Laura, Ella, Amy, Peter, Leah and Ben. He was preceded in death by father, Bruce.

Born in Orrville, Ohio, on September 9, 1950, Mark was raised amongst many immediate and extended family members. A graduate of Orrville High School and Otterbein College, he taught sixth grade in Shaker Heights before he joined American Greetings.

Mark’s life was a study in kindness and courage. At the age of 49, he left corporate America to travel to Africa, a life-long dream, and to pursue a new career path as a furniture designer, builder and restorer. He generated and restored many carefully wrought and enduring pieces of craftsmanship. He and Lee spent many happy years working from their home businesses, walking their two golden retrievers in the Metroparks behind their home, and hosting countless family gatherings, including an annual summer family vacation on the beaches of North Carolina. A master breadmaker, Mark was often baking and giving away his artisanal loafs.

Mark’s gentleness was felt by all who knew him, and he goes before a host of friends who adored him for his humor, attentiveness, and generosity of spirit. Many of Mark’s friendships were rooted in his decades-long study of Gurdjieff, a spiritual practice that fortified him and gave him peace during his illness. His love was boundless and clear; it galvanized and will forever support those who love him.

Together With Moths

2009-06-14T13:33:00.001-07:00

Schantz Woods

2009-06-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

Mark,

I wanted to let you know that a group of alcoholic assholes who meet on Thursday evenings are praying for you and also the boys from the C.Y.O. wrestling team.

I’ve heard it said that God hears the prayers of drunks and children so we’ve got those bases covered. I don’t think even Mr. Gurdjieff could steal these sincere prayers before they get to heaven.

I’ve tried to keep this image of you in my mind- when we were working on the movements hall roof, you were cutting up that steal beam and I was thinking “man, this guys tougher than I thought”!

A group of learned men got together once and asked “what’s the worst sin a man could commit” after some time they decide that it was being a bad example.So I think the best thing a man can do is be a good example,which is what you’ve been for me.

I’ve always admired your kind nature and the way you handle people,always with a sense of fairness. I feel that you and your father can both be called “good householders” in the highest sense.

I want you to know your in my thoughts and prayers thru this difficult time.

Wishing you well,

Matt

(enclosed is a special prayer from Thomas Merton)

11-24-08

Rest in Peace my friend.

American Springtime

2009-03-01T14:36:00.000-08:00

Letter of support for Dana

2009-03-01T14:33:00.000-08:00

Feb. 26, 2009

Committee,

I have committed to have a solo show of new paintings at the Asterisk Gallery in August 2009. I’ve been following the progression of the Tremont art scene for many years and have been impressed. Asterisk Gallery has especially interested me. The exhibitions I’ve seen are very innovative and I’m excited about the opportunity to show there.

Some of the favorable impressions I’ve had are a direct result of Galley Director Dana Depew. His fearlessness in exhibiting high quality, insightful art shows is admirable. The exhibits there are professional, well organized and memorable.

The Gallery is large, clean and well lit, an ideal place to have an art show. When I spoke with Dana he seems to have a long term plan and I get the sense that he’ll be part of the Cleveland art scene for a long time.

I’ve been painting in Cleveland for thirty years and have seen great efforts stall due to lack of support. My wish for Dana and the Asterisk Gallery is that he receives the help and support he needs to carry on this worthy and much needed endeavor.

Sincerely,

Matthew Dibble
www.dibblepaintings.com

Light Wound of Early Youth (oil on Canvas) 72"x48" 2007

2009-02-15T15:16:00.000-08:00

Facing Down Giants (oil on canvas) 68"x45" 2007

2009-02-15T15:11:00.000-08:00

Skins of Light

2009-02-15T15:07:00.000-08:00

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.

Cavalcade of Oddballs

2009-02-15T15:05:00.000-08:00

Smaller-scale drawings reveal artist's power of personality
Friday, January 20, 2006 Zachary Lewis Special to The Plain Dealer
Painting is Matt Dibble's claim to modest fame in Northeast Ohio, but it isn't his first love. Pencils, pen and ink were his tools well before brushes and oils, and they've never been far from his hand.
The drawings themselves have remained even closer. Ever since his days at New York's Cooper Union School of Art, Dibble has tended to reserve his drawings exclusively for family and friends, insisting they were too personal for the general public.
But there was one friend who insisted on sharing. Christopher Pekoc, a prominent local artist and an art instructor at Case Western Reserve University, championed the drawings and convinced Dibble to exhibit them.
"The drawings have a basic power," Pekoc says. "They come from a place that's totally honest. The paintings, too, are impressive, but they don't pull me in the same way these strange figures do. The lines in the drawings are so sure, and the proportions are very attractive."
If Dibble was shy about his drawings, at least he didn't have to transport them very far. He found a willing venue directly across the hall from his downtown Cleveland studio: a new multipurpose gallery called Studio of Five Rings. Founded in October 2004 by Youngstown native Matt Cook, Five Rings does triple duty as a winery and a martial arts school.
It's not a large space. Pekoc had more than 100 drawings to choose from, but was forced to narrow the show down to 15 pieces. Each one of them, however, reveals an exceptionally confident hand. Faces, bodies and other shapes overlap in multiple perspectives in a way that recalls the cubism of Picasso. Yet their sparseness and bold outlines call to mind Chinese brush paintings. There are even traces of Surrealism in a stitching pattern Dibble occasionally employs.
Strangely, though, the drawings bear little or no resemblance to the rest of Dibble's vast output. In contrast to the paintings -- large, colorful abstracts -- the drawings are black and white and essentially figural. All but one are small, too, roughly the size of an average sheet of typing paper, while any one of the paintings alone could occupy an entire wall.
It's not immediately clear why Dibble sheltered this body of work from the public. There's nothing intimate about the compositions themselves, nor do their titles ("Pointy Idiot," "Without Fire," "Taller Every Second") give away anything particularly confidential.
Still, the artist had his reasons -- and pretty good ones at that. Dibble says all those fragmented figures represent various aspects of his personality, aspects that aren't necessarily flattering.
"I know that once people see these, they're going to come up with deep psychological interpretations about me," he says. "But the fact is, the spiritual, sacred things, they always come to me at the oddest moments."
Lewis is a free-lance writer in Cleveland.

Thin Layer of Dirty Snow (india ink on canvas) 6"x5" 2005

2009-02-15T15:03:00.000-08:00

Day Dreaming About Sandwiches (india ink on paper) 4"x5" 2005

2009-02-15T14:51:00.000-08:00

Night Visions

2009-02-07T03:29:00.000-08:00

Nights Of The Soul
Tregoning Gallery Revisits Chris Pekoc's Powerful Early Works
By Douglas Max Utter

For the past 20 years, Cleveland-based artist Christopher Pekoc has been known mainly for works created from shards of black-and-white photographs, mixed with other reality-evoking translucent materials and stitched into a provisional whole on a sewing machine. Often, the abrupt transitions of his high-contrast photos are softened with the warm amber tones of shellac or adorned with gold leaf. Decorated and pierced with clean round holes, distressed and crinkled, they evoke a mysterious, dangerous night world, a place where a hand or a bird or a tree may suddenly flare as beacon or portent. Pekoc's textures and imagery speak of the burnt, hard smell of city nights and of identities underlying the daily costume changes of our lives.

Like much art of the last 50 years, Pekoc's nearly sculptural works are rooted in the early modernist discovery of collage and its reintroduction as one of the principal tools of pop art in the early 1960s. Repositioning enigmatic fragments as he inserts them into the abstract space of a painting or drawing has given Pekoc a way to enter his work obliquely, a side door through which the creative act passes unobserved, allowing the artist to transport scenarios directly to the eye as if snatched whole from the unconscious mind.

Pekoc's show Night Visions at Tregoning & Company displays a suite of six smaller mixed-media, photo-based collages made between 1995 and 2002. But the big surprise for newcomers to Pekoc's oeuvre is the presence of some 20 larger canvases and works on paper produced by the artist over a 10-year period starting in the mid 1970s. These are strikingly contemporary-looking works, sometimes painted with an airbrush, or consisting of pastel and charcoal rubbed into etching paper by hand. The consistently smooth-surfaced, hard-edged, oddly ambiguous shapes in works like "In the Middle of the Night" (1982)Êor "Night Watch" (1979) would be at home in any show of up-to-the-minute painting. They seem to reflect contemporary software imaging techniques, apparently referencing an information-driven culture where the abrupt importation and seamless juxtaposition of disparate data is how you get through the day. Yet they were painted well in advance of the contemporary computer age.

"Strike" from 1975, for example, is a three-by-six foot, two-panel composition on canvas dominated by abstract forms rendered in primary colors. The airbrushed acrylic work is reminiscent of its pop-art forbears, especially James Rosenquist's billboard-derived canvases. But there are more differences than similarities between the two. Pekoc has taken Rosenquist's dismemberment of commodity-reality a step or two further. Nothing in his early paintings and drawings reads as a familiar object. Instead, Pekoc presents a cipher of interlocking shapes. And although his vocabulary is made up in large part of sensuous, even luxurious shapes and surfaces, the work doesn't seem to react to consumer culture. The subject matter is personal, dealing with relationships, hopes and fears in coded imagery that sometimes breaks down into dotted lines, letters and mathematical symbols, as in the 1976 painting inscrutably titled "Space Window CDSM12/24p."

Tregoning's installation sketches a history of Pekoc's techniques and the logic of his sensibility across a three-decade span. A narrow, waist-high plexiglass vitrine in the center of the gallery contains a sample study from the mid 1970s, salvaged from one of Pekoc's many studio drawers. It's a postcard-size model for a painting, constructed of pieces of ads cut from a magazine of the period. This sketch-collage was the first stage in a long process that involved making multiple related compositions, photographing them, projecting the resulting slides and composing works piecemeal after tracing outlines on canvas. Even relatively small paintings like those on view took weeks to complete, and large-scale projects required many months of elaborate effort. Pekoc's 20-by-40 foot mural on canvas titled "Night Sky," on permanent exhibit at the west end of the Reading Room at the Cleveland Public Library, was commissioned and installed in 1979. In terms of scale it was the most ambitious effort of that period, but as a composition, it's typical. A kind of maquette - consisting of a study for the painting itself, mounted in a large black-and-white photograph - is included in the Tregoning show and was the centerpiece of his original proposal. In the painting itself, a great pale crest rises smoke-like against a background of glowing gray, emerging from a crumpled riot of deep red and blue. Pekoc worked as a scarfer in a steel mill for a year or so. His translation of the harsh, almost demonic, power and scale of steel production into a new emotional range, using intimate quotations gleaned from the glossy urban nights where Halston and Lauren Hutton reigned, is a metaphorical triumph.

Many of the pieces in Night Visions were composed from the pages of fashion magazines - Vogue in particular. Often, Pekoc used ads for high-end luxury goods, transforming carefully sliced, anonymous commodities into fragmentary symbols. They seem neither manufactured nor natural, but like sensuous theorems - semi-abstract objects at play in a dimension of calm desire. That they seem so fresh as they enter their fourth decade is a tribute to Pekoc's deep sincerity as a lexicographer of personal truths.

Christopher Pekoc: Night VISIONs 1975Ð2000 Tregoning & Company 1300 W. 78th St. Through March 29 216.281.8626

CHRISTOPHER PEKOC JOINS TREGONING & COMPANY

2009-02-03T14:08:00.000-08:00

Tregoning & Company is pleased to announce that CHRISTOPHER PEKOC – one of the most admired and honored Cleveland artists of his generation – has joined the gallery in a new partnership.

Bill Tregoning, T&Co owner and gallerist stated, “Chris’s decision to join Tregoning & Company confirms once again our commitment to the very best creative artists working in our area. Pekoc joins our roster of other mature contemporary artists of our region. We exhibit their art in one of the finest, most spacious galleries in Northern Ohio, and creatively market their works, drawing on our 35 years’ experience in the Fine Art market.”

To celebrate this important new relationship, Tregoning & Company has organized the first significant exhibition of Pekoc’s art from 1975 to 2000. CHRISTOPHER PEKOC | Night Visions | 1975-2000 presents 26 seminal works of art on canvas, paper and mixed media that form the foundation of Pekoc’s continuing exploration of “the Human Condition” – deconstructed, fragmented and resurrected in remarkable new forms. “Collage and photography [here seen in fragmentary magazine images] are the root of Pekoc’s entire artistic output,” said Tregoning. “These exhibited works provide a powerful key towards understanding the work he is admired for today.”

Night has always provided Pekoc refuge from daily distractions and a quiet, still environment within which to work. Night’s mysteries and ambiguities, its romance and danger, infuse the airbrushed acrylic paintings, the pastels, the prismacolor drawings and watercolors seen together here publically for the first time in decades. Many exhibited works have received critical acclaim and multiple exhibitions.

CHRISTOPHER PEKOC | Night Visions | 1975-2000 continues through Saturday 28 March 2009. A reception for the artist – including remarks by Dr. Henry Adams and the artist himself – will be held Friday 20 February 2009, from 6 to 9 pm. Ample free guarded parking is adjacent.

Tregoning & Company is in its 26th year in Cleveland. Focusing on fine art in all media from the 17th century through to the present, the gallery specializes in American Art and is noted for its extensive collection of art by artists of the Cleveland School. Its 4800 square feet of gallery space is easily the largest commercial gallery in Cleveland, located in ARTEFACTORY: The Studios of 78th Street building, at 1300 West 78th Street, in the dynamic new Detroit-Shoreway/Gordon Square Arts District. The gallery is easily reached off the end of Shoreway, just 5 minutes from downtown Cleveland and 20 minutes from both East and Western suburbs.

Spine of the Hymnal

2009-02-02T16:58:00.000-08:00

Impressions from a recently attended Guitar Mass.

Remembering Bellaire Gardens

2009-01-27T09:14:00.000-08:00

Cleveland Canvas Goods

2009-01-22T20:44:00.000-08:00

Bill and Mike Morton owners of Cleveland Canvas Goods traded me 100 yards of high quality canvas for a large oil painting installed in there office. I've been using there canvas for years and have been very happy with the results.

My Last Drink

2009-01-04T08:02:00.000-08:00

My last drink was January 4th 1984. I used to say that I quit drinking that day, I tried to quit drinking many times before that. It was easy to quit but hard to stay quit. Why did I have the strength that day? After long reflection I've realized that it wasn't me. I was given a gift,the gift of sobriety.
I was spending all my money on alcohol, sick and tired of being sick and tired, feeling angry isolated and alone. I had experienced all the things that go along with an alcoholic life. The most honest prayer I could muster was "Lord I don't want to quit drinking but I know I have to". On that last day I had a glimpse of what kind of guy I really was, not the picture I had of myself but my real situation.
I realized I was nothing, that I had a ruthless concentration on self and my life was ruled by self pity, anxiety, resentment and hate. I was an asshole who didn't now how to live sober. This was my "bottom", it felt hopeless.
I knew about a group of people who's only aim was to stay sober and help another alcoholic achieve sobriety. They told me I didn't have to live that way any more and showed me a new way of life, something I didn't know anything about. I realized the only way to learn how to stay sober is by some one else who all ready had.
I was given hope and a new way of living to be applied one day at a time.

Abstraction Now 2009

2008-12-29T06:09:00.000-08:00

Chased From the Market 30"x25" (oil on canvas) 2008 accepted in a show juried by Franklin Hill Perrell,Chief Curator at the Nassau County Museum of Art.
The judges were looking for Art that reflects the influence of 20th century abstraction. The show opens Jan. 31st at the Firehouse Plaza Art Gallery.

Motel That Accepts Goats

2008-12-28T16:47:00.000-08:00

Tregoning And Company

2008-12-25T08:21:00.000-08:00

Art dealer William Tregoning visited my studio,was impressed by the work and agreed to represent me. I'm grateful, Bill has helped me to re-examine my abstract paintings and has been working with me on cataloguing my art work.
His thoughtful comments and his knowledge of Cleveland art history and the history of art in general is impressive. The gallery which can show large paintings easily is well put together and I've enjoyed the shows there.
We are fortunate to have Bill in Cleveland,he helps me realize that the relationship between dealer and artist is a two way street.

Restless Joyce

2008-12-16T09:43:00.000-08:00

The people that I learn from in my life are the people who expose me for what I really am. Joyce Stevenson was one of those people,she was a mentor and a friend.
At a time in my life when I was trying to find meaning I had been reading the works of some Gurdjieff students,Ouspensky and Maurice Nicole and became interested in the Gurdjieff work. A former art teacher of mine was in a group and mentioned that Tom Forman a student of Gurdjieff was giving a talk at the Friends House in University Circle. I attended the meeting and met Joyce's husband Frank who invited me to some informal meetings at there home.
I sat in a group with Joyce for about ten years,she was fearless in here approach to the work and always willing to expose her weaknesses and fears. Her example showed me that it was crucial for this study to have a "question" and to work in a way not looking for results but to except my situation in the moment.
Joyce was also one of the most restless people I ever met,but her sincere efforts constantly supported my work. Now Joyce can rest in peace.

2008-12-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

Guarding the Well
On the surface these paintings are very ordinary and not meant to be taken literally.
During certain times of year, the ancient Celts “guarded their wells” from being poisoned. I’m interested in the inner meaning of this story; it seems related to my search. I have noticed in myself two natures: one grasping for a shortcut to enlightenment, and another more patient and allowing. This deeper part of me needs to be nourished, but how?
I spend most of my working life fragmented while giving little time to quiet searching. Why bother there’s never any “payoff?” But if I’m physically still enough and able to abandon old ideas and habits, I find a deeper, more reliable place that has a different taste. The questioning process begins: Why keep painting?
Somehow, the answer is connected to feeling. The new paintings are about inner postures and states, unseen things, aspects of my nature I am unable to put in words.
These acts of painting have helped me become more related to my inner world.
My purpose is not to confuse or be mysterious but to follow my interests and be open enough to allow these images to come through me. This process helps to feed the deeper parts of myself, places not accessible by ordinary efforts.

2008-12-07T08:34:00.000-08:00

2008-12-07T08:31:00.000-08:00

2008-12-07T07:47:00.000-08:00

The show is on for August 2009.

2008-12-07T07:42:00.000-08:00

Asterisk Gallery director Dana Depew considers exhibiting some of my new paintings.