Matak’s Museum Patrons, free-standing, cut-out paintings on wood in acrylic and graffiti marker (the same materials with which he makes his wall-mounted paintings) represent gallery-goers in all their multifariousness, gallery-goers of every stripe and kidney.

So cunningly, so persuasively painted (nobody paints hair, spectacles, jackets, backpacks, socks, shoes, pinstripe suit material or rumpled jeans quite so well as Matak does) are these museum patrons that, when placed about the gallery in attitudes that vary from fierce inspection to casual stances of semi-avoidance, degrees of distraction, hideaway moments of woolgathering or soul-wrenching dividedness [my favourite of these personages is Matak’s agonized Purple Suit (Looking Away & Seeing Too Much)], they really do appear—at first glance and even afterwards—as art-viewers who have simply got to the exhibition before we did.

Unlike the famous cutout, free-standing, paintings on sheet metal by American painter Alex Katz—which are full-length portraits complete in themselves and which confront the viewer frontally and openly—Matak’s Museum Patrons, each painted exactly the same way on both sides of the wood, are entirely closed off and centripetally self-involved. They are always unavailable to us, always retreating from us, and while they doubtless perform as players in what Matak calls “an exploration of surrogacy in regard to how we interact with things in our environment,” it is quickly clear that however much they may function as surrogates for us, they serve mostly to point up the degree to which each of us is solitary before our own perceptions—or lack of them. Like the rest of the world, Matak’s Museum Patrons are each (the phrase is W.H. Auden’s) trapped in “the cell of themselves.” We can see them, but they cannot see us—or, apparently, anything else either. Are we essentially like that too? Within that question lies the edginess, the genuine pain of Matak’s explorations of surrogacy.

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