Charles matton biography

Charles Matton makes architecture and puts it in boxes. Ranging, in this show, from under two feet to nearly three feet high and seen through the boxes’ glass fronts, the meticulously detailed sets are sometimes based on real places, such as the Vienna office of Sigmund Freud, and other times are imagined and somewhat fantastic. The artist’s studio is a recurring theme; whatever the case, the scenes are antique in mood. According to Barbara Krulik, author of the exhibition’s catalogue essay, Matton has been “profoundly influenced” by Rembrandt, and there is little in these works to suggest the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. Even when Matton bows to a modem artist, he chooses a realist painter—Edward Hopper—and depicts an empty, unfurnished, unrenovated New York loft, an interior basically from the nineteenth century. A canvas leaning against one of the walls and a little pile of newspaper, some plaster debris,

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