Mathew Cerletty
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mathew Cerletty (born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1980) is a painter based in New York.
Cerletty holds a BFA from Boston University [1] (2002).
He is represented by Rivington Arms Gallery [2] in New York, and his work has been featured in several exhibitions at high profile commercial galleries such as Mary Boone Gallery[3], Gavin Brown’s Enterprise [4], and Andrea Rosen Gallery [5] in New York, Peres Projects [6] in Los Angeles, and Hiromi Yoshii Gallery [7] in Tokyo. His work has also been showcased in the “USA Today” [8] show at The Royal Academy [9] in London.
Mathew Cerletty’s practice spans a wide visual repertoire, ranging from highly detailed realism to sparse figurative abstraction. Portraying beautiful people in opulent surroundings, Cerletty’s work points to a suburban culture of leisure, fashion and sexuality. Reminiscent of Alex Katz and Eric Fischl [10], Cerletty’s canvases are rendered with a casual flourish. His paint becomes a tool of aesthetic fetish to describe an image-conscious world of middle-class ennui.
Cerletty paints with a distinctively dandyish flair. Bold compositions, jarring colours and overwhelming decorative motifs are expertly co-ordinated as streamlined aspects of design. Executed with a sleek fragility, his works are elegant statements of a heightened and refined sensibility. Prizing style over substance, Cerletty poses his figures as subjects of fixation. Beauty is construed as virtue; its hollowness seduces with a status-symbol promise of sophistication and enlightenment.
In Cerletty’s most recent work, his flawless realism is exchanged for the immediacy of expression. Figures are fragmented into barely recognisable features, abstracted through obsessive contemplation. Framing attraction as the sum of isolated parts, torsos, arms and hands are offered as objects of preoccupation, icons infused with fanciful charisma. Set against uninterrupted backdrops, his figures disband as arrangements of colour, shape and form, recalling the Suprematist’s pursuit of ‘non-objective emotion’.
