Two concerns have engaged me throughout my career: color and geometric order. The grid is the underpinning of these concerns. Within its rigor I organize repeated elements—usually a stripe or square—painting them with a succulent brush that is at odds with the reductivism of the composition. I have long referred to my work as lush minimalism, a term that’s as tongue in cheek as it is true.

The saturated color I use, influenced by Siennese paintings and Indian miniatures, is nevertheless of its own time. A 21st-century palette embodies different intensities, transparencies and chromatic relationships. The encaustic paint I use for much of my work brings a differently refractive quality to the color than other mediums, as well as optical depth and substantive texture.

I work in series, often on a small scale, because my chromatic concerns—subtle shifts in hue, texture and depth—require intimate viewing. I often install these small works in wall-size grids—color and geometry asserting themselves on a larger scale while maintaining the essential intimacy.

The series I’m working on now, Silk Road and Vicolo, are primarily small paintings. Uttar, which I’ve worked on for almost eight years, started out small but it is now larger.

Silk Road is the most reductive painting I’ve ever done. Each painting is a luminous monochrome achieved by plying layers of translucent paint at right angles. Actually it’s not a monochrome at all. There are many layers and many hues, and they coalesce in your own retina into the color you perceive. When you’re up close, you’ll see that the most subtle of grids is formed by the trail of brush marks and intentionally grainy elements in the paint. With a suggestion of iridescence and weave, the series grew into its name. I’ve limned each painting to charge the intensity of its color field and, I hope, to spark your eye on a visual journey of its own.

Vicolo, Italian for “alleyway” or “narrow passage,” exists for its skived and riven surface. Each painting, built up of dozens of layers of specifically chosen colors, consists of parallel channels that have been exposed as I drag a metal tool across the wax. The process consists of chance imposed onto plan, for even slight differences in the pressure of the tool will engage the surface differently—skimming across it or digging into different layers. The painting reveals itself as I work. Linearly, Vicolo is like drawing; physically, it's more like sculpture.

Uttar began in late 2000 as a series of 12 x 12 inch paintings. Over the years their number grew to several hundred. In early 2008 I realized that I wanted a larger surface for these grid based compositions so I’m now working them larger—60 inches at their longest or widest dimension. (Not all of these paintings is in encaustic. Quadrate, a related series, is in acrylic.)

I invite you to read the interview with me by Julie Karabenick, editor of Geoform, an online curatorial project whose focus is geometric abstraction.

joanne@joannemattera.com