Uttar: Poetics of Materiality and Process
By Flavia Rando, Ph. D.
Joanne Mattera's Uttar suite floats translucent layers of brilliant color within a minimalist grid. Mattera traces warp and weft—strength and gossamer delicacy—conceptual underpinning and structure, the fabric of human construction. Uttar represents an artist's life-work, varied, refined, repeated.
The fluid quality of Mattera's medium, encaustic—pure color suspended in molten wax—requires that the artist work quickly and intuitively, "in the space between rigor and abandon." Pigmented wax is layered and fused, light and color are reflected and held in suspension. Seeking what she calls the "instant of clarity"—and drawing on the global tradition of painted miniatures, from Renaissance Siena to Persia and contemporary India—Mattera orders the sensuality of the artist's touch through the austerity of the grid.
"Working against the seduction of the wax," against being seduced by the beauty of the medium, Mattera carves, scrapes, and abrades the surface, exposing layers of color, exposing the erotic, beneath the grid's order. For Mattera the greatest energy is generated in the interval between lush and austere, grid and surface. Jeweled tones—turquoise, ultramarine, garnet, coral, golden yellow, and opal gray—are layered, they shimmer, the grid shifts, and our vision is held, suspended. Without narrative, scale is subverted, fluidity contained, and luminosity captured.
Uttar is intimate, embodying the artist's emotional response to the material world. Mattera is in love with color, with material, with process: "It is just me and the material; what is in my brain, body, and soul." Each panel, a small devotional, can be held in the span of the artist's hand—with a single gesture, the sweep of her hand, she is able to mark its breadth. As the Uttar suite unfolds, the viewer is allowed a privileged glimpse into Mattera's artistic process. Each panel, echoing the one that came before and suggesting that which will come after, energizes the others, and the viewer's field of vision. Working serially, she says, "following ideas as they move forward and back, twirl, turn a corner, improvise, is like a dance." Mattera recapitulates the history of her painting practice-re/considering its vocabulary and re/formulating her mature aesthetic. For Mattera, the process of making art is a process of intuition working within a disciplined framework—it is both work and dance, rigor and love. Without narrative, Mattera expresses the range of emotional responses for which we have no language.
Ongoing, the Uttar suite is the everyday work of one artist, one woman—a poetics of materiality and process. It is daily ritual, obsession, meditation. Each subtle alteration of the artist's gesture becomes a study of interior dialogue giving expression to the process of (making) art and life. Uttar records the artist's "total and unconditional" dedication, a narrative of love, passion, and reason.
Flavia Rando is an art historian and critic who writes and lectures on contemporary art and ethnic, gender, and sexual identifications, most recently, as a contributor to "Re-writing the History of American Twentieth Century Art," forthcoming in the Art Journal.