PIG IRON by Matthew Dibble- Review by Christian Schmitt

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