Joanne Mattera

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Joanne’s work is in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Connecticut College Print Department; University Collections at the University of Albany; Wheaton College, Norton, Mass.; the U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C.; and institutional and private collections internationally.

Silk Road is chromatically juicy and compositionally reductive. I refer to it only partly tongue in cheek as “lush minimalism.” Each painting in the ongoing series is a small color field achieved by layers of translucent wax paint applied at right angles. The series, which I began in 2005, was inspired by the shimmery quality of iridescent silk, hence the title, but quickly evolved into more expansive explorations of hue and surface. In plying a richness of paint against the austerity of a (very subtle) grid, I set in motion a small-scale dynamic in which more and less jostle for primacy.