Although they are surfeited with obvious blandishments (hot, clangy colours, simplified, almost cartoonishly-clear forms, playful, witty and frequently caustic art-historical allusions and resonances)—the stuff of pleasure and infra-dig connoisseurship—Adam Matak’s paintings end by showing a lot of people looking bored, distracted, puzzled, irreverent, or muttering darkly and dimly about what they are supposed to be gazing upon. The men and women (mostly men) in Matak’s paintings yawn, doze off, faint, laugh immoderately, read and more or less do everything except look at the artworks Matak so deftly provides for them.

Here is a partial tally of Matak’s encoding of various recent modalities of museum inattentiveness: two of the personages in his paintings are yawning (in Philistine and Liberation); three are reading (Escape Route. David, and Portrait of a Young Scholar); one (The Age of Arrogance) is gazing off into the art-free distance; one (The Fall of Man) is plugging his ears—to shut out the noise of one of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes; one is falling backwards, insensible, fainting into the arms of his companion [The Physical Impossibility of the Death of Painting (RED)] while the two gallery-goers in The Hero—one of whom looks like tough guy movie actor (and art collector), Edward G. Robinson—look wary, standing, full of fear and trembling, before a luridly red representation of William Ronald’s painting, The Hero (“Careful,” the Robinson character says to his companion, “I’m not sure what it is”). One of Matak’s dramatis personae—the grey-suited man in The Big Payback (such a cinema noir title!)—looks as if, in the course of standing by a Warhol Flower painting, he has just been shot (he mimics the violent, newly-shot torquing of James Cagney’s body in the William A. Wellman’s 1931 film, The Public Enemy).

Clearly, the people inhabiting Matak’s paintings are far less savvy, less enlightened—and more dangerously disposed—than…well, than all of us!

The push-me-pull-you tensions between the denizens of his pictures and their viewers—us—is so fully felt, so amusingly felt, sometimes so condescendingly felt, that you can come all too easily to the conclusion that the artist, irritated at the increasingly cool reception of high art in an acceleratingly subcultural society, is fighting back by painting states of inattention, indifference and self-absorption in what one had hoped was an art-seeking public—and making these insufficient public responses to art his great subject.

But Matak does not, I feel sure, see himself primarily as a satirist—or at least not a destructive one. For him, the most serious sin embodied by the gallery-goers in his paintings is inattention, the inability to focus on the art-matters-at-hand. “I’m not complaining,” he once told me. “I’m just trying to be helpful.” His paintings, if they slap us all on the wrist a little bit, do so in admonition, not as condemnation.

One of the central sources of enjoyment in Matak’s paintings lies in the way he conflates—within the same painting—an exuberant kind of joy about art and art-making and a restlessness (and sometimes a genuine disappointment and severity) about its reception and ultimate fate (“The words of the dead,” writes W.H. Auden, in his 1939 poem about the death of W.B.Yeats, “are modified in the guts of the living,” and I suspect the same fate awaits the brushstrokes of the dead as well). Matak’s paintings are full of art history, of allusions to the history of taste, of a relishing of art-historical anecdotes (often wrenchingly displaced), of the stacking of painterly references one upon the other.

And these bristling references are not just a game of insider-knowledge. What interests me greatly about these initially disarming paintings is the degree to which the playful progress of their imposed programs points up and makes way for a passionate art-making that belies and transcends the cartoonish transparency that seems to be the armature upon which each of them is wound.

Take The Physical Impossibility of the Death of Painting (RED).
In an earlier incarnation of this eerie, complex work, the shark was green, not red—a mordant echo of the infamous formaldehyde-filled-vitrine-with-suspended-dead-shark by Damien Hirst, which bore the title The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

Matak’s shark-painting (now a carnal, dried-blood red) is, like the earlier green one, his pop-simplified version of John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark from 1778—which shows a young boy being rescued from the cavernous jaws of the terrible, algae-hued man-eater (or, I this case, boy-eater). In Matak’s revisionist work, the hand of the fainting man (who is fainting in an attitude of crumpled authority a la Robert Longo’s full-scale drawings of defeated executives) seems to share the pictorial space allotted to the shark’s mouth. He may thus be overwhelmed either by the horror of the depicted shark-attack or (or as well as) the impact of a watershed article from 1981 in October 16 (clutched in his right hand), by critic Robert Crimp titled “The End of Painting.”

Here, the art-smart references are piled on like the allegorical levels of a medieval romance. Some Mataks, by contrast, are less ornately organized—though no less pointed. In Philistine, for example, a stone-coloured museum visitor yawns distractedly before the armless allure of an ice-blue Venus de Milo. Sometimes, Matak has even had recourse to a sort of dumbfoundingly direct, surrealistically-derived unlikeliness—as in The Treachery of Images, where the Edward G. Robinson bad guy, now white as plaster from the shock, appears somehow to have been shot by a stylized, Roy Lichtenstein-like pistol: “I don’t believe what just happened,” he says—and neither do we (except to admit that art can, on occasion, provide a shock of recognition as suddenly surprising and destabilizing as a gunshot wound).

At his most ambitious, Matak pulls out all the stops and gives us epically-scaled mystery—all the more remarkable, given his avowed open, cartoonish style. In the magnificent, almost indecently dramatic Possession, for example, five men in shirts (in a rainbow of pastel shirt-colours) appear to cling by their fingertips—like drowning men clinging to a raft—to Matak’s complex reconstitution of Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827).

What do they want from this widescreen orgy of destruction and self-immolation? Are they supplicants, bowing down before the painting’s utter nihilism, its violent power, its maelstrom of apocalyptic cleansing? Or are they clinging to it, as a source of renewable energy for the depleted culture of which they are almost identical representatives? The answer is Adam Matak’s. The majestic questioning—now set free by the painter—is, as always with art, our own.

Gary Michael Dault,
Napanee, Ontario,
December 21, 2010