CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/17/2019

Matthew Wong's porous reality in 'Landscape Painting Now'

Matthew Wong's "Untitled" (2016) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, launching tonight, Wednesday, April 17, from 7–9 PM, at the Whitney Shop with a panel featuring Wong, Verne Dawson, Lois Dodd, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Alison Elizabeth Taylor and author and moderator Barry Schwabsky. "Matthew Wong… says he starts each painting without any idea of what he will paint," Schwabsky writes. "Explaining, 'I may just pick a few colors at hand and squeeze them onto the surface, blindly making marks, but at a certain point I will inexplicably get a very fleeting glimpse of what the image I may finally arrive at will be, sort of like a hallucination,' he sounds more like an Abstract Expressionist (de Kooning: 'Content is a glimpse') than a Pop artist, yet his densely woven webs of variegated painterly marks add up to places that look uncannily familiar… Wong's paintings are usually inhabited by a figure who might be interpreted as the artist's avatar—a personage trying to find a way through a world that might be one's own hallucination or someone else's video game. In the Post-Pop landscape, reality and what the outsider artist Henry Darger called 'the realms of the unreal' are inherently porous."