Matt Kleberg: Giving In to Let Go
PROJECT: VARIOUS WORK
WORDS & ARTWORK: MATT KLEBERG
I approach every new painting with 99% confidence in a plan, and 99% of my paintings veer dramatically away from that plan. Sometimes the shift happens right away, and other times it occurs weeks or months down the line. That repeat failure of my initial proposals used to frustrate me. It felt like any painting that resolved itself in an interesting way was the result of my stumbling blindly into some good luck or accidental success. It seemed to me that what I really brought to the piece was just the naive willingness to start and the rest was out of my control. And I was right. That is exactly how it works.
My paintings tend to borrow from architectural motifs—I’m always going on walks and taking pictures of buildings that capture my eye—and end up looking like colorful but vacant stages, altars or building facades. The graphic quality of the work reads cleanly from across a room, but upon closer look, the surface reveals itself to be a layered build-up of decisions, blunders, false starts and revisions—time and history baked into otherwise static and symmetrical compositions. I’m after a structured, solid sense of unknowing, a concrete expression of mystery and paradox. I stumble around searching for just the right color juxtaposition, just the right form, waiting to be surprised.
"Things may not always go according to plan, but in the end, I find exactly what I was looking for all along. Stumbling, as it turns out, is just fine."
