catalog essay by Sara Callahan

There is something about the middle that bothers me. The concept of the middle path suggests a pandering to some homogenized mass of mediocrity. It creates a world in which romantic comedies always do better than grainy black and white art-house films; we can all supposedly identify with Julia Roberts trying to find love, but only a handful of bespectacled lefty intellectuals can be bothered to struggle through subtitles filled with existentialist angst. To me the middle has represented that which is boring, mediocre, un-passionate and, quite frankly, dangerous. It is politician-speak for passivity and evasion. It is the DaVinci Code and the Cheesecake Factory. It is call-in-shows on the radio and chardonnay with peach flavor. It is everything dumbed down and passively offensive. Enter Matthew Offenbacher, turning all my preconceived notions on their head with a body of work that is a celebration of the place where extremes meet. The middle, to Offenbacher, is where complexity happens, where subtlety reigns, where every step is taken with deliberation and intention. It is so easy to fall towards the left or the right, the high or the low, the religious or the secular. It is much harder to embrace complexity and nuance. For Offenbacher, the middle is far from passionless or mediocre, and I will do my very best to put my prejudices aside and follow him down that precarious path.

One of America's first experiences with images used as propaganda was during the Western expansion. As seductive images of pristine and untamed territories were finding their way East, the land itself was becoming increasingly domesticated, crisscrossed with mining towns, railroad tracks and factories. In these paintings and photographs, the terrible beauty of expansion, the attraction and the horror of the Western landscape, was carefully manipulated to emphasize the thrilling appeal of the sublime. The promise of a new beginning of a landscape that could somehow save us, was being broken just as it was being expressed. Offenbacher relates this to the widely-held belief that painting can express the ineffable:

I think the ineffable is like a natural resource which is harvested, processed, and sold by artists and the institutions that support them. The myth and romance of painting, with its promise of entry into a transcendent realm, has a lot in common with that of the West.

The sublime experience of awe and elevation we feel when we're close to something of great power does not guarantee transcendence. On the contrary, Offenbacher argues, it is often the sign of its opposite: the expiration of that guarantee. The enormous optimism and promise of Manifest Destiny was too great to hold its own weight. The truth about the West, or about painting, is only found where the line between the wild and the tame, the absolute belief in the transcendent power of painting and the absolute skepticism of the same, intersect.

This theme can be seen in Knowing the Work is imperfect but submitting oneself to it, with a great sadness. Offenbacher employs an almost pointillist technique in the background, a sublime space that emanates outward, hinting at the vastness of painting's potential for transcendence. The coyote, however, brings us back to earth. The creature is firmly planted on the ground, the materiality of its coat palpable and the mass of its body heavy as it lies in the middle of the painting. The dead bird in the foreground, freshly killed and about to be devoured, is the fertile middle ground. This is where Offenbacher wants us to pause; this is where worlds collide; this is where belief and skepticism push against each other.

Offenbacher's paintings are like distilled moments in time drawn out, sped up, and folded back onto themselves. Historical references blitz by, loaded symbols settle into the thick paint, art history is woven into the very fabric of the canvas. There is a tremendous visual richness in his paintings, an iconoclastic joy in his picking and choosing of paint techniques and handling; but he is never irreverent. He is not out to destroy or deny the past, but he also does not let the weight of history burden him. The time-consuming nature of his process is embraced rather than lamented, and perhaps this is the same kind of quiet rebellion that he so admires in Henry David Thoreau, whose ghost haunts this exhibition at Howard House. To willingly engage in slow work is to place oneself on the outskirts of a society that supremely values productiveness and capital. It is a gesture of resistance to an industrialized world obsessed with efficiency. Offenbacher stubbornly refuses a fast and simple reading of his work, and his transformation of the gallery space is part of this strategy. Domestic time moves at a slower pace than that of the art institution. By placing his work on burlap-covered walls, the white cube of the modernist gallery is interrupted. This is similar to the way that time and art-historical references continually interrupt and expand our viewing of his paintings.

I have not yet talked much about the animals; they will be the first thing you notice, so I thought they could wait, but they are starting to screech, howl and scratch for our attention. Beavers, weasels, turkeys, moles, snakes, otters, and coyotes it should come as no surprise they are North America natives all loaded symbols that Offenbacher uses as stand-ins for painters and painting itself. They function as props: re-enacting themes, attitudes and theories from the history of painting and aesthetics. They are both pioneers expanding westward and the victims of that expansion. There is tremendous conceptual and visual complexity in Offenbacher's use of animals. What could possibly be a more apt symbol for the act of painting than the mole digging through the debris of old cut up paintings, painstakingly emptying a space for itself out of the history of discarded art? We watch the weasels tear apart the carcass of a large horse, drawn to the drama and savagery the way we are drawn to accidents on the highway. We are pulled in, and the more we look the more we start to mimic the animals tearing apart, analyzing, and digging through the layers of meaning. It is as though the animals seduce us into analyzing the very act of seduction.

The animal and the civilized part of our beings are fighting for dominance, the visual and the verbal are battling it out. Offenbacher's titles are intricate and poetic, and to me they function as subtle interruptions. It is as though Offenbacher is telling us: yes, I know that you will look at these animals and get all kinds of associations, and I know the paint is luscious, but I will not allow you to get comfortable there. Your other faculties need to participate, no part of you can be lazy—and I will push and pull you between your eyes and your brain, pull you apart like weasels pull apart a horse carcass.

The title of Offenbacher's exhibition, "Captain of a Huckleberry Party" is taken from a eulogy written by Ralph Waldo Emerson after the death of Henry Thoreau. The essay—mostly laudatory—contains this phrase: "Wanting this [ambition], instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party". Emerson may have intended this as a critique of Thoreau's lack of ambition, but Offenbacher enthusiastically embraces the insult and proudly joins Thoreau at the huckleberry party. Just as Thoreau chose a middle path between the wilderness and civilization, between anarchy and government, so Offenbacher chooses to trod the path which sits between 'painting as religion' and 'painting as base materialism'. Offenbacher's middle is more fertile and complex than either of the extremes surrounding it. He engages in a tender yet savage critique of dogma and ideology, showing us the value of a place where being comfortable means that you are probably wrong.

review by Jen Graves

October 10, 2007

Matthew Offenbacher is involved in a practice that still is startlingly dangerous, although it is not new. "Bad painting" began in the 1980s. Offenbacher's update on the genre continues its flaunting of conventions of taste (though with all the ironic reversals, it's hard to remember whether tie-dye and mosaic are out or in at the moment), but deletes the attending sneer. His folksy '70s scenes populated with animals—beavers, otters, horses, weasels, owls—channel historical modes of "transcendental" painting (Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, Malevich, Rothko) as well as the spiritualist crap sold at, say, Pike Place Market. They draw together those old poles of avant-garde and kitsch under an umbrella of tenderness. Which is weird. And risky.

He doesn't always pull it off. An Alfredo Arreguin—style painting of a coyote on a hippie-dippie pointillisty ground is just a bad painting, not a good-bad painting. Paradoxically, it suffers not only from simplistic derivativeness but also a failure of skill. The coyote is inert, the background muddy instead of sparkly.

But when he does pull it off, the paintings have good hearts and a lot on their minds.They're trying to figure out, like so many post-abstraction post-figurations, how to square the voyeuristic, religious sublimity invested in wilderness (and painting) with the total skepticism of modern life and art. Where many artists draw out the doubt of the viewer in order to toy with it, Offenbacher wants to draw out faith as an equally fecund proposition. It's timely, considering the coinciding popular terror of both religious fanaticism and natural disaster.

His show's title, Captain of a Huckleberry Party, invokes American transcendentalism by referencing a criticism of Thoreau by Emerson. Thoreau could have been somebody, captain of the world, but he just hung out in the woods, captain of his own little huckleberry party, Emerson charged (in a speech at Thoreau's funeral, no less). The notion of private pleasure versus public action has echoes in historic constructions of femininity and masculinity as well as in historic theories of painting (the picturesque and the sublime, swishy pop and tough-guy abstract expressionism).

Burlap covering the white gallery walls and a cheesy dark-wood molding form the ideal innocent yet lightly knowing backdrop for a painting of two cavorting otters (even formed loosely into the dreaded yin-yang pose!) seen from underwater, the aqua-stained canvas bleached to depict the light of the sun above the water's surface. In another painting, Some Rothko Problems, three adorable white weasels feast on the psychedelic, floating carcass of a horse. They're almost paintings that a New Ageist might hang in the den, but better. Or worse?

—Jen Graves

installation view

Interview by Billy Howard

BH: One of the first pictures I saw of yours was from your beaver series, and what intrigued me initially was the striking paint handling and the interesting color harmonies which helped create a sense of wood, sticks and fur. I wonder if you could talk a bit about how you choose your techniques to fit a particular subject?

MO: I just love playing with paint. I'm always trying out new techniques. Also, I am really literal minded. Before the beaver paintings I was making these paintings that looked like animal pelts or slices of big tree trunks. For the pelts I used a spackled kind of furry method and for the bark around the trees I was using thick paint put on with a palette knife, trying to make it look more bark-like. So in that sense the different techniques came out of trying to approximate the materiality of what I was painting. Also, I am really interested in the history of painting and these paintings are talking about different moments in history. Knowing the work looks towards pointillism and some of the later variations on it in French painting at the end of the 19th century. Some Rothko problems refers to Abstract Expressionism in New York in the 1950s. Another painting in the show, The freak in the state of total tokenism, refers to futurism and Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. The technique I chose in each one is very much related to what philosophies of painting I wanted to bring to mind. I think the history of painting is really available to painters now, in a way that it wasn't before. The whole huge sweep of painting history is totally fair game. I think painters can use art history in a way that is not necessarily ironic or critical, but that recognizes it as the stuff we have to work with, and it is good stuff, you know, rich and beautiful.

BH: One of the things that is interesting to me in Knowing the work, and also in Some Rothko problems is the sense that something is sublimated, and that we have to unpack the painting in some way in order to see it.

MO: I am so glad to hear you use the word 'sublimated'! The idea of the sublime is one of my main interests. It's that persistent belief—or disbelief—that looking at paintings can take you outside of yourself and put you in touch with something greater. Mark Rothko is a great example of a painter on the far end of that spectrum, the belief end. Frank Stella, or maybe a 1970s photorealist painter like Robert Bechtle, are examples of the skeptical end. But the painters I most admire choose a middle path, a middle space between this desire for transcendence and desire to keep things down to earth. Alice Neel, for instance. In Knowing the work this plays out in the relationship between the ground and the figure. The background is this endless grid, expanding outward, suggesting infinity and all the transcendent ideas that come with that. But the coyote is painted in a way that is bounded and solid, grounded. In between, in the lower right where the dead bird has fallen—or in the case of Some Rothko problems where the dead horse is floating—is the place that I am most interested in.

BH: The title of the show "Captain of a Huckleberry Party" ties in with that line of thinking. Could you tell us a bit about where that came from?

MO: I stole that from something Ralph Waldo Emerson said about Henry Thoreau, from a eulogy he wrote after Thoreau died. The essay, as you would expect, is mostly celebratory but there is one paragraph where Emerson is pretty harsh. He basically complains that Thoreau, with all his talents and intelligence, could have done anything. He could have been the general of a great army, or a great politician, or a captain of industry. But instead he choose to be the captain of a huckleberry party. Thoreau walked this middle path, between a hugely idealistic vision of a better world and quiet observation of the actual, flawed world around him. He walked it with extraordinary fierceness. Emerson's criticism misses the point, I think. It is exactly Thoreau's modesty—retreating to his cabin by the pond, his civil disobedience, his essays—that makes him so important. What Emerson saw as a lack of ambition was actually a different kind of ambition, a way of making things happen that obviously had an incredible impact on the world in the end.

BH: So let me ask you this, if you weren't a painter what would you be?

MO: My dad was a public school administrator and my mom a social worker. When I started college I thought I was going into social work. I guess that explains my obsession with whether I am doing any good in the world! I do think painting is an extremely privileged thing to pursue. Thoreau's way of working is the ideal I aim for, but, like most artists, I have these long stretches of total self-absorption. At my best moments, though, I hope to be someone who turns their attention to observing themselves and their surroundings, someone who looks at how things work and how things work together, and then can share some of that insight. This is of course very different from social work. It asserts a much more subtle pressure on the world.

BH: Could you tell us a bit about your use of animals in your work, the way the animal functions as a stand-in?

MO: This goes back to the animal pelt paintings I was telling you about earlier. Those actually came about because I was interested in economics. I was looking at the pelts in terms of the fur trade, and I was trying to draw an analogy from that to the art trade. I had this idea that transcendence in painting was like a natural resource—harvested, processed, consumed by artists and the people and institutions that support them. One thing I was trying to bring out was that the resource—the animal, the transcendent aspirations of painting—has to be killed before it can circulate. After painting animal pelts for awhile, I got more and more interested in the animals themselves and their relationship to humans. I love all the ways animals are used in folktales and myths, the universality of it, the way we so easily identify with animals in stories. The stories I tell are pretty straight-forward. Like in the painting with the blind mole, this poor mole digging through all this stuff, literally digging through small pieces of other paintings, trying to clear a little space for itself. Or in Exhibition, where three turkeys are competing, seeing who can put on the most impressive display.

BH: It is a very interesting time to be making work that deals with the sublime. We hear stories of wolves walking through Bellevue, or mountain lions killing domestic animals in Issaquah, and there is this sense of nature pushing back. A book came out recently titled The World Without Us which explores what the world would be like if humans suddenly disappeared. For example the New York subway would be filled with water in a matter of hours because currently tons of water is being pumped out of the tunnels daily. The sense of security that we have, our notion that we can control nature is very prevalent, but then natural disasters happen and we are confronted by our weakness in a very dramatic way.

MO: That's it! That's a great description! That's exactly the emotion I am so interested in, the sublime. You are standing there safe on the civilized side of the line, contemplating the awesome force of nature ranging on the other side, and it's oddly fun. It's weirdly satisfying. Why is that? It's like when people on the East coast were getting these beautiful romantic ideas about the West from Albert Bierstadt paintings. And that line itself, that threshold, that extraordinarily narrow border that divides the pleasure of a Bierstadt painting from the tragedy and suffering the western expansion actually caused—or that divides the pleasure of reading The World Without Us from the actual horror of a natural disaster—that's what I am super interested in.

BH: How would you feel if you just worked in obscurity, if you never achieved fame as a painter?

MO: To have an audience is really important to me. I don't need to be an international art star, and in a sense I am most happy when other artists connect with my work. But it has always has been important for me to get my work out there. Both for my own mental health and sanity—it makes me feel like I am doing something in the world—but there are also philosophical reasons. I don't believe in the idea of the suffering tormented genius, compelled to make work in solitude and nothing else matters. Paintings are supposed to get out there and do things in the world. In fact, I believe that paintings really belong in homes where people have a long-term experience looking at them, both engaging with the work intensely, but also incidentally when walking by a painting on their way to the kitchen. I think it is in that way my paintings can do their best work.

review by Regina Hackett

October 18, 2007

Matthew Offenbacher paints as if he's weaving, which gives his work a folk art quality. He also paints in pure streams, simulating the abstractions of early 20th-century innovators such as Sonia Delaunay. His paintings are about painting, and each is a dive into history's pool.

"Exhibition" is a response to Whistler's "Peacock Room." Instead of peacocks, Offenbacher offers turkeys with paint gems at their feet, signifying the conflicts of the original commission.

What is painting for? It can celebrate the process of a brown burrowing mole, as in a painting whose title begins, "Recognizing the diligence with which death approaches." It can fill the night air with intimate consequence, as in, "Some Rothko Problems," and it can color the moon as Thoreau saw it from Walden Pond, after Emerson said he was wasting his life.

One thing is certain: Offenbacher is not wasting his.

statement

I grew up outside of Portland, Oregon and left right after high school. Since returning to the Northwest a little over a year ago, my sense of time has been really weird. I used to think time was a straight and level track and I was ticking along it from the past to the future. Lately, though, I have been seeing loops and folds and strange switchbacks. Didn't I pass through here already? Shouldn't this come later?

During the past couple hundred years painters have been thinking a lot about time. Many have tried to freeze time in place, to create a big cataclysmic crystallization of time, like a waterfall in the middle of winter. The idea was to make paintings that would never grow old. Instead, this approach left painting in a state of paralysis.I think my paintings are about trying to find a way to release painting back into the flow of time.

The animals in my paintings play in time. They populate stories about the peculiarly complicated lives of people. They are the heroes and villains: ravaging, exploring, devouring, and manipulating gestures from the long history of painting.

Press Release

We are delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Matthew Offenbacher in our project space. Offenbacher is a painter's painter: with masterful control he explores the materiality of paint for all its worth, immersed in a dialogue with the history and practice of the medium. What interests Offenbacher is the notion that looking at paintings can somehow give us a transcendent experience, allowing us to move beyond ourselves towards something more universal and spiritual. He discusses, dissects, and questions this notion with his richly textured paintings of animals and plants, immersing himself in the medium while simultaneously questioning it in a way both ruthless and tender.
   Offenbacher plays with metaphor in his work, often using symbols overflowing with contradictory meanings. Several of the paintings on view contain images of owls, which, throughout human history, have been taken to represent foolishness/wisdom, witchcraft/medicine, life/death, art/war. With their almost ludicrously large eyes, owls are often ascribed supernatural vision, capable of seeing great distances, in the dark, and with a near 360 degree of freedom. Owls see a view of the whole that is beyond the grasp of mere human vision. This makes the owl a particularly useful image for Offenbacher's purpose—being as rich in conceptual underpinnings and symbolism, in ideas about looking and being looked at, as the notion of painting itself. In previous work Offenbacher used natural history subjects to explore painting's affinities with the dream of the American West, and beaver imagery to explore the idea of constructive abstract art. The nature metaphor remains here but is pushed further, towards a richer and more mythical place, interrogating Romantic notions of nature as a portal to God.

statement

Beavers, like people, put incredible effort into making their surroundings safer, more comfortable, efficient and stimulating. Much of this effort is directed by one thing—the organizing principle of beaver society—control over the flow of water. An analogous principle is at the heart of painting—control over the flow of time. The ability to slow, reverse, and transcend time is one of the most tenacious claims made by painting. This essential optimism, despite all evidence to the contrary, is what these paintings are about.

Dedicated to Anne Rapp Offenbacher
(1912 - 2004)

review by Robert L. Pincus

Do beavers do architecture? Sculpture? Matthew Offenbacher's art makes you think about such questions, which are fun to ponder and a touch provocative in their implications.

After all, we tend to think of culture as something separate from nature. And while beavers aren't about to make objects from marble or galvanized steel, might their impulse to build go beyond the merely functional?

Offenbacher, who lives and works in San Diego, clearly enjoys parallels between nature and human culture, which is one reason why he's chosen to paint beavers. Then, asking you to suspend disbelief, he makes paintings as he imagines beavers might—if they had the wherewithal to paint. Thus, the two meanings of his exhibition title—"Beaver Painting."

This show, Offenbacher's second at Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, picks up where his 2004 exhibition left off. Then, he was looking at the gray area between nature and culture from a different vantage point. The paintings exploited the similarity between animal hides—deer, otter, skunk and squirrel—and the sort of color field paintings of the 1960s that emphasized flatness and pattern. Sequoia resembled a slice of giant tree trunk that led you to the same sources in recent art history.

They were conceptual art with an Americana bent. They were also trompe l'oeil paintings—though their illusionistic effects weren't as proficient as they should've been.

Now, with the beaver pictures, he's rendering landscapes of a sort. Painting With Picture of Its Own Construction is thick with line created by branches and twigs—its structure derived from the sort of building that a beaver might do. And right in the middle of the scene, hovering on a branch and casting an eye the viewer's way, is a rather charming looking example of the species.

There are two beavers in Painting Thinking More or Less, one on a beaver-built structure and the other in the water. Of course, the artist is thinking about painting in the making of this canvas and this show. But the implication is that we are to consider about how much a beaver thinks about what he constructs.

Once we start looking at the wood configurations within the paintings, other parallels appear. The beaver edifices have "God's Eyes" macrame patterns within and prismatic colors, as if there were something retro about musing on nature at all. And there is a nostalgic aspect to communing with nature, of course, which Offenbacher is planting into the mix with his allusions to a 1960s craft craze; it was a back-to-the-land era.

His different concerns don't quite cohere. There is a stream-of-association quality to these paintings, in which he's thinking about the intersections of human and animal creativity at one moment and the relationship between nature and the 1960s in the next. All quite interesting, but the thematic road map to these works takes you in too many directions at once.

Then there are the paintings that beavers would have made, if they were in a modernist frame of mind. Geometry dominates: the little canvases mingle flourishes from cubism and one of its American offshoots, synchronism. One wonders how these beavers learned their art history—or maybe they just don't know they're repeating it. At any rate, their abstractions need some work.

Offenbacher has surely anticipated the fun a viewer can have, spinning scenarios about the paintings "made" by beavers. But his images of beavers turn out to be a lot more engaging.

installation views

notes

Dear Mark and Anna,

The beaver paintings came about from thinking about the "Looking at ...." paintings from the last show. I was thinking about how passive those animals were, staring dumbly out of the picture plane, standing in for a specific kind of stupefying looking and connoisseurship of "great painting". I thought it would be interesting to lend them agency, have them actually do something. The show we did last year with the "Looking at ...." animals and the pelts and the trunk slices was pretty dark. It was about death and how dead things are used, how paintings fail, how modernism failed, etc. I wanted these new paintings to be more about life—still involved in critical thinking about how paintings work and don't work, how they function as tokens in complex systems of exchange, how art relates to art history—but with something balancing out the darkness. I wanted them to show more the possibility for construction, connection, communication, for hope and belief in painting's transcendent endowments. Beavers seemed like good animals for this project because they construct things. They are only rivaled by humans by the extent they will go to in order to make a place livable. Their engineering feats are pretty astonishing. One thing I've gotten interested in is the violent history of their contact with humans, the result of fashion for beaver skin hats. In this country, the Hudson Bay Company (whose coat of arms has the inscription Pro Pelle Cutem, "A skin for a skin") carved a quasi-governmental empire out of large regions of the western territories in the 19th century, bringing New World beavers to the edge of extinction. These new paintings, like my previous ones, might have the look of a kind of natural history, but I really intend them as metaphors for the strange activities of human culture. That is why the beavers in the paintings all try to make eye contact with the viewer; I want you to put yourself in their place. The larger paintings depict beavers building their dams and lodges, which are rendered as these crystalline phantasmagoric encrusted rococo painterly sort of constructions. They are paintings about painters and painting. This self-reflexivity is what I was trying to get at by naming them after Robert Morris's 1961 minimalist "Box with the sound of its own making". I was thinking of these constructions as large, glittery, useless things, like crystal chandeliers, which I think paintings are kind of like. Useless—but here also are the very serious beavers doing the hard and obsessive work of building a home. The way the constructions look have a lot of muddled sources. Among them: French 18th century painting (Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher), 1960s and 70s yarn craft projects (especially "God's Eyes", crochet owls, and bargello, which is a kind of repeated pattern needlework derived from 17th century Florence). Also, the 1966 sci-fi novel "Crystal World" by JG Ballard (not incidentally the favorite book of Robert Smithson), in which the protagonist visits a small, but growing, corner of a South American rain forest which, through some obscure warp in the time-space continuum, is turning crystalline. All the animal and plant matter is dissolving into hard frozen beautifully diffracting inorganic crystal. Ballard's descriptions of the rainbow light effects of this crystal rainforest, along with the plates in a book reprinting Goethe's theory of colors from 1840 that I stumbled across at the public library, are the sources of the strange optical haloing effect around the beaver constructions. Goethe was arguing with Newton in his theory of colors. Newton said colors are slices of the white light spectrum, his theory elegantly demonstrated with a prism (like on Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album). Goethe was also using prisms, but he was looking through them at printed black and white shapes, and observing the way the spectrum split at the borders between dark and light. He concluded color is an epiphenomenal effect of black and white, and so reason (black & white) has primacy over emotion (color). His physics were pretty much wrong, of course, but his close observation of the perceptual effects of color has had an enormous impact on the history of painting. Espoused by Turner, Romantics of all sorts, impressionists and so on. I think this is all fascinating and painting in the weird optical effect of splitting the spectrum around dark and light shapes, as if you were looking at the painting through Goethe's prism, gives the paintings an strange visual and historical vibration. One thing I think the beavers are doing, in the metaphorical sense of their activities in these painting, are creating dams that are intended to slow or stop the flow of time and history through pictures. I think it is a flow that has been reduced to a trickle by Modernism's effects. The beavers are trying to stop up the almost emptied-out picture plane, to force a deep pool of those things swept away to the ocean, to create a safe place to build their home. Most literally, they (and I should say "I" here because the beavers are shouldering way too much of my own stuff), most literally I am trying to find a way to reverse the drought, to "re-enchant" pictures (to steal Max Weber's term). There is some nostalgia in this, I guess, nostalgia for a time and an art that was more centered and grounded, that maybe looks something like the good life espoused by Scott and Helen Nearing in their 1970 book, "Living the Good Life". Simplicity, social consciousness, harmony with nature, civic responsibility, collective living, volunteerism, moving from induced neediness to satiety. If the Nearings are one pole of these paintings, the yearning for a late 1960s-early 1970s idealistic, Marxist, back-to-nature variety of idealism, then the other extreme is held in place by Robert Smithson, with his nihilism, entropy, passivity, ambivalence, indifference, sedimentation, accretion, crystallization. I think my painting shuttles between these two. I first came across the Nearings as a child in a book my grandparents kept on their coffee table in their summer cottage in Vermont. "The Good Life Album" contained obscure and kind of wondrous pictures of a back-to-land community the Nearings founded in the 1950s in the very place my grandparents cottage stood. My grandparents actually bought the place from one of the original settlers, when the Nearings and many of their followers packed up and left in the 1970s for somewhere even more remote (northern coastal Maine). Anyway, I was always fascinated by the pictures in this book, and, later, by the people from that time who remained in the area. The Nearings and their philosophy are, for me, all tied up with my grandparents, who balanced their summer back-to-land experimentation with a life in Queens, NY as an antiquarian bookseller and a social worker. I have been thinking a lot about them lately (my grandmother died this past year). I think these beaver paintings are also about them, their dramatic life, and its impact on my family. Before Queens and Vermont, they were German Jews who escaped during the war through occupied France (where my dad was born), Spain, Cuba, and finally New York. The beaver paintings are set up with a double structure, like the double structure of rococo architecture, with the smaller abstract paintings conceptually nestled inside the larger figurative ones. These paintings (the "Painting beaver paintings") are the paintings I imagine the beavers would paint if they were painters. I started making them look a lot like cubists paintings, like Picasso & Braque were doing in the early 1900s, the stuff Gertrude Stein championed. I thought the methodical, maniacally additive, apparently analytical, deliberately primitive approach of these paintings somehow related to how beavers think. I also got interested in mid-century geometric abstraction (with all its rationalism and scientific materialism), and 1980s design, especially some of the most repulsive color combination of teal and turquoise and orange. The beavers' paintings are a collision of these things and probably a few more I'm forgetting. I mostly wanted these to look sort of familiar, but also strange, alien, off. The reason I am working towards this strangeness is I want the beavers to function as an exotic other: the inscrutable, mysterious other onto which idealist fantasies can be projected. Imaginary beaver art offers me a method to experiment and think about exoticism in painting. While dehumanization in art and culture is something to take very seriously, with all its devastating political and social effects, de-beaverization is maybe not such a serious problem, and so I think opens up the subject in a new way. Beavers are my Cathay. They are the foreign place I can safely project my most romantic longings for primitiveness, for wolfishness (to steal Ruskin's phrase), for the noble savage, for everything that tries to get at the sort of transcendent experience painting always promises to deliver. Okay, hope there is something in all this you can use. I'm going to attach below an image of the first abstract "Painting beaver painting" because I don't think you've seen these yet. Let me know what else I can do in the run up to the show.

review by Victoria Reed

The straightforward imagery of American wilderness in Matthew Offenbacher's intriguing paintings arouses curiosity which he sustains with his skillful techniques and intellectual ideas. His recent work resembles cross sections of sequoia tree rings, animal hides and large-scale pages of pressed wildflowers that, in their simplicity, evoke childhood memories of tales about Daniel Boone and the stories of prairie life by Laura Ingalls Wilder. But Offenbacher's subject matter is not so much a commentary on romantic American idealism as it is a complex riddle that ties the American frontier with American modern painting, painting in general and the myths and nuances that surround these various concepts.

Painting, or rather traditional realistic European painting, was challenged by artists throughout the twentith century, especially by American abstract painters who wanted the flat plane of the canvas to be recognized, and Offenbacher is having fun oscillating between the desire of the artist to vivdly recreate the real while simultaneously commenting on the nature of this act. Nowhere is this more obvious than in four works that resemble their titles. Deer Pelt, Otter Pelt, Skunk Pelt and Squirrel Pelt, by way of canvas shape, paint color and technique, appear to be the real things. Such thorough mimicry precludes comparison to seventeenth-century Dutch painting because they kept their subject matter within the confines of a rectagular canvas that never igonored perspective whereas Offenbacher tricks us into thinking these are actual animal skins.

Offenbacher's wildflower paintings also tweak our perceptions of reality in that the paper fiber on canvas looks like actual pressed flowers. Pansies, a small oval-shaped canvas that could easily be found hanging in a nineteenth-century American home, is especially remarkable for its authenticity, as is Fern and Dandelion. It is only in a work such as Morning Glory, which is modern in the large size of the canvas and the fact that the flowers fall off the canvas, that Offenbacher's cunning playfulness becomes apparent. The realism of this work begins to resemble abstraction. What, we begin to ask ourselves, is the artist really depicting?

This question becomes particularly important in the six Sequoia paintings: what appears to be cross sections of unique tree trunks, are also clever allusions to the minimalist pattern paintings of the 1960s. The artist's toying strategy of placing two opposing American ideals within the same context is most obvious in a number of works that depict illustrated animals but which, in their titles, refer to recognized works by famous American abstract artists. Looking at Big Red by Sam Francis, a small, simple straight- forward drawing of a polar bear in tones of gray, white and black, contradicts Sam Francis's painting at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which is lush in its field of rich shimmering reds and receding grays. Similarly, Looking at One (Number 31, 1950) by Jackson Pollock (also at MoMA), a small rendition of a bat, in no way comments on Pollock's drip masterpiece full of dramatic gestures and lyrical movements. Which takes precedence, the image or the title? In many ways this exhibition is about myths but it is also about idealism, ideology and the purely conceptual. Offenbacher, by way of his subject matter and painting style, cunningly makes us think about American values, American traditions, American folklore and the very different aspects of American Art.

Installation views

statement

Paintings often try to present things that are unpresentable. In doing this they traverse the line that divides sensible ideas, like how light falls on a basket of apples, from insensible ones, like the nature of infinity. Modernist painting tried to cross this threshold by dramatizing the gap between the desire for transcendence and the limitations of painting itself. My paintings try to talk about the pathos of this arrangement by drawing an analogy to the natural history of the western United States. I think the ineffable is like a natural resource which is harvested, processed, and sold by artists and the institutions that support them. The myth and romance of painting, with its promise of entry into a transcendent realm, has a lot in common with that of the West. The history of both can been seen as a series of exchanges between the desire for boundless space and the reality of finite resources. My paintings use the flora and fauna of the West to elaborate this analogy.