Continuing through October 16, 2025
In 13 works executed in oil stick on canvas, Matt Kleberg plays with formalist and post-formalist ideas about the recent and not-so-recent history of painting. These works on shaped canvas configurations conjure Frank Stella’s pre-1971 paintings in that their compositions are logically deduced from the shape of their formats.
More subtly, we can see how Kleberg’s paintings point to the subtle ironies of Peter Halley’s work juxtaposing the alleged transcendence of Greenbergian late-Modernism with ironic indications of jail cells, reminding us of how the carceral implications might be read into that aesthetic. Kleberg’s works also do something else. They take on the outward forms of Trecento altarpieces to suggest objects of worship even as they eschew any overt reference to religious narrative. All the paintings are symmetrical in design, creating lively contrasts with inventive color shifts that often belie their symmetry. For all of their apparent forthrightness, they prove to be delightfully subtle on second glance.
A good example is a large work titled “Frame (Bless Babel),” which has eight peripheral rectangles surrounding a ninth located at the center of the work. The peripheral rectangles are subdivided with alternating stripes of light grey-green and dark violet, half horizontal and half vertical, while the inner rectangle is a pink cruciform made up of overlapping layers of pink oil stick. I could not help but think of the striped stonework in the interior of the Siena Cathedral, restrained and slightly zany at the same time. The colors are also reminiscent of the marble stonework of the cathedral in Florence. The pink cruciform suggests an interior life force protected by the flanking rectangles.
Another work, titled “Coral Corral,” is somewhat smaller and quite a bit more colorful, featuring horizontal and vertical stripes of tinted orange and muted purple. A mirroring configuration is formed of four squares of tinted yellow buttressed by four rectangles of tart green, surrounding another cluster of shapes that skew toward perspectival illusionism, looking a bit like an open portal revealing internal illumination.
How does Kleberg manage these effects? In all cases, the key lies in his layering of oil stick pigments (i.e., oil pastel) to create chromatic undercurrents for other colors closer to the surfaces of his works. These undercurrents energize those surfaces, making them fizzle and vibrate with an optical energy contained in and condensed by the repeated rectangles. There is no indication of any transparent membrane between the layers, but the underlayers always seem to be intact despite the addition of different colors on top of them. The important point is that their optical mix creates a stunning visual vibration that energizes the work.
In the upstairs gallery, Nicasio Fernandez exhibits 12 of his small, eerily seductive paintings, only a few larger than a normal sheet of copy paper. The intimate scale of these works contributes to their power of seduction, as does their moody tenebrism, making them seem like disquieting shadow plays glimpsed in a twilit darkness. This move to such tenebrism is new for Fernandez, whose previous work was much more colorful in ways reminiscent of the work of Peter Saul. Now, amidst encroaching shadows and eerie illuminations, we see salutes to Odd Nerdrum’s gloomy allegories, with an added surrealist twist conjuring the work of Lisa Yuskavage.
Fernandez populates his darkened spaces with figurative characters that are comically monstrous, as is the case with “Dark Corner,” featuring a furtive figure looking as if he or she were absconding with stolen property, turning around the corner of a building. The figure wears a long brown coat and casts a suspicious eye toward the viewer. Only one hand is visible, and it looks like a glove full of sausage. The strangeness of the scene is clinched by the figure’s nose, which looks like an small elephant trunk, an attribute shared with the figures in Fernandez’s other paintings. Are we to think of Philip Guston’s paintings of Richard Nixon reconfigured as grotesque genitalia? Maybe or maybe not; but for sure the effect is one of disquiet, although not so much that it erases the odd, endearing charm of the character portrayed.
