These works were painted in the last two years, during the pandemic. With rich and dark colors and somewhat unsettling subject matter, they capture a sense of disquiet, isolation, and uncertainty – feelings we have all experienced in recent times, and hope to overcome soon.
Enigma – a solo Exhibition Gallerie Valerie, presents Matthew Felix Sun, September 3 – 26, 2021.
628 2nd Ave, Suite 203, Crockett, CA 94525
Opening reception September 3rd, from 7 to 9 pm.
The pieces presented by Gallerie Valarie are chiefly representational, even realistic, yet they often cloak twists or hidden meanings. Beneath their surfaces are darker truths, or riddles that invite further investigation. Paintings such as Anselm Kiefer’s Bathtubs, Arabesque, Leisurely, or The March of Time are imbued with enigma.
My oil painting “Leisurely” has been selected as part of the Artists Choice 2022 juried exhibition (Sep. 27 – Nov. 4) at San Francisco Women Artists Gallery (SFWA).
Juror: Ashley L. Voss, Owner & Director, Voss Gallery.
RECEPTION: Saturday, October 1st, 2:00 – 4:00
647 Irving St. at 8th Ave., San Francisco, CA 94122
Tue. – Sat. 10:30am to 5:30pm | 415.566.8550
Though lately I am mostly attracted to shifting patterns, colors, tones, and shapes, from time to time, I am still inspired by pure scenery, particularly when I can discern such variations, and especially if the landscape evokes strong emotions such as moody melancholy. Such an image I had encountered in Manchurian China, barely a few months before the pandemic started to ravage the globe, intrigued and challenged me to create an oil painting when sheltered at home, Crisp, an understated work aptly captured a sense of community, isolation, and resilience.
Identifying myself primarily a representational artist, does not exclude me from time to time being drawn to purely abstract visions, which excite with contrasting or even clashing colors, interplay of of shades, lines, and intricacies of patterns and forms. One of my successful results is a recent gouache painting, Time Frame, which intrigues viewers with ever expanding viewfinders, appealingly complementing secondary colors, and an array of ever shifting lines of different lengths, angles, and hues.
Time Frame Gouache on Paper 7” x 11” Completed in 2018
This painting will be exhibited at Berkeley Expression Gallery, September – December 2018, as part of the “Autumn Colors” group exhibition.
Immediately after the devastating 2016 US presidential election, I was in the grip of a stark vision, in which innocent and powerless people were rounded up by an oppressive strongman regime. That was the inception of my new project, “Our Winter of Discontent”, to evoke an assembly of miserable, discontent, and angry people, behind a sprawling web of barbed wire and menaced by dark clouds from above. This vision was not paranoid fiction; it was based on observation of Donald Trump’s increasingly divisive and hateful rhetoric, which led to his capture of the presidency, and reaffirmed the ugly political and cultural reality of an almost apocalyptic US.
The world at large had been threatened in recent years by rising totalitarian and nationalistic trends, and the diminishing of liberal democracy. The situation worsened every day as I painted, under the weight of Trump’s daily assault on democracy, free press, the rule of law, etc. My warning vision became a sad prophecy, as many asylum seekers and their young children were brutally separated, and summarily detained. It seemed — and seems now — that things could only get worse, that those behind the barbed wire fences could well include U.S. citizens and legal immigrants, not only those deemed “illegal.”
A good vision doesn’t necessarily lead to good painting. After many months’ struggle, I put aside my first attempt, which had become somewhat too belabored, and a bit unyielding, and started over with version two. Yet, though satisfying to a certain degree, it became a bit regimented, less spontaneous, and also a bit removed from my vision of a manic world of disorder.
Having learned my lessons from those two attempts, I started a third version, and it achieved what I set out to document, with an unsettling and fluid visual style that matches our disturbing and depressing zeitgeist.
Here, the final product, “Our Winter of Discontent”.
The painting was completed before the world was assaulted by the novel Coronavirus, and most brutally affected in countries whose leaders are waging wars against science, and suppressing free press and truth. The painting was created before the tsunami of “Black Lives Matter” protests took hold in the US. But it evokes, or perhaps portends, the suffering and struggle that rolls on ceaselessly through human history.
These are the emotions and historical trends, my painting “Our Winter of Discontent” is trying to capture and reflect.
Our Winter of Discontent Oil on Canvas 22” x 28” Completed in 2018