#matthew sepielli

[contemporaryartdaily]

Group Show at Jack Barrett

[tigerstrikesasteroid]

To Tiger With Love July 11 - July 26, 2014 Opening reception: Friday, July 11, 2014, 6pm -10pm

Hours:  Saturday and Sunday, 2pm-6pm and by appointment (484)-469-0319, [email protected]

[tigerstrikesasteroid]

Matthew Sepielli: Cathedral in Title Magazine

"Sepielli’s main body of work over the past few years consists of paintings on canvas, carpets, and books, each with dozens of layers of paint cracking and blistering to an amazing textural effect. The works are abstract, even irregularly geometric, yet they seem to have more in common with Albert Pinkham Rider, the late 19th century American master of the pocked and fissured landscape painting, than they do with Paul Klee or contemporaries like Amy Sillman. The edges of Sepielli’s paintings are irregular gobs of paint clinging to a rectangle, and it is along these edges that viewers can unravel the history of each work’s making" [MATTHEW SEPIELLI: CATHEDRAL, BY JACOB FEIGE]

[tigerstrikesasteroid]

Matthew Sepielli: Cathedral - Text

“…one of the temple’s treasures, hanging in a large, deeply recessed alcove. So dark are these alcoves, even in bright daylight, that we can hardly discern the outlines of the work; all we can do is listen to the explanation of the guide.”

     - Excerpt from Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s, “In Praise of Shadows”, 1933

“All right,” he said. “All right, let’s do her.”

He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,” the blind man said.

So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy.

“Swell,” he said. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.”

     -Excerpt from Raymond Carver’s short story, “Cathedral”, 1981

[tigerstrikesasteroid]

Matthew Sepielli - Essay

Matthew Sepielli’s Heavy and Not-heavy Paintings

Matthew Sepielli informs me that every desert island in the world has plastic bottles that have washed up on the shore, so if you find yourself washed up on a desert island, at least you’ll have a bottle to fill. The woods behind the suburb where he grew up—the woods behind all suburbs—were and are full of accumulated debris, the leaves growing out of cans, phone books, and sneakers. 

Rug fragments, books, boards, and tin scraps serve as partial or full supports for Sepielli’s paintings. Paint-can lids punctuate the surface of Black-Blue-Brown-Bark-Brick. Parked against a window, the painting lets light flood in through diamond-shaped holes cut into the colored disks. As in many of his works, the material reality of the painting dominates the image. These are, in terms of pounds and ounces, heavy paintings. Not so in terms of bathos. Funny color schemes, compositions that spell out acronyms for things like Physical Education and Pink Force Field, and a general sense of ‘what if I try this?’ run throughout. 

The surfaces are crusty. Shiny, slimy-looking layers of glue and varnish seem to bubble out from below. They elicit a powerful urge to touch: to run fingers over the holes, like inverted Braille, drilled into the books; over the strands and objects frozen in the paint. Like the paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, there’s a strong chance the materials will continue to interact and change for a long time after the last brushstroke is laid down. Which makes sense for paintings made on fragments of Tibetan carpets woven from the hair of those sheep that could withstand the highest peaks. The assumption for ex-carpet-salesman Sepielli is the same as it is for the shepherds—change is the only constant. And as any of his paintings may have started life as a palette for another painting, so too could the backwards B in Black Book be two of those Himalayan peaks turned on their side, or a window to an earlier incarnation of the painting, or the abbreviated name of selfsame work. And if the dots and lines in Stick Stacks are as reminiscent of the twinkling lights of the oil refineries seen from the low-teen exits of the NJ Turnpike as they are of woven nomadic designs, well that’s probably fine too.   

  -- Julian Kreimer is a painter and assistant professor of Painting at SUNY Purchase College. He has written for Modern Painters and Art in America, for which he is currently a regularish contributor. 

[tigerstrikesasteroid]

Matthew Sepielli

Matthew Sepielli  October 1 - 31, 2010 Opening reception: Friday, October 1, 6 – 10pm

[MORE IMAGES] [ESSAY BY JULIAN KREIMER]

PHILADELPHIA- Tiger Strikes Asteroid is pleased to announce the opening of its October exhibition, featuring new paintings by Matthew Sepielli.

Sepielli's paintings are crusty, colorful, slimy and shiny. Their surfaces are heavily worked to the point that they seem to bulge out of their supports, creating strange contours and surfaces. Utilizing a “What if?” approach, Sepielli makes his work using lots of paint, string, studio debris, wool carpet and other materials to arrive at works that have an unlikely clarity.

Matthew Sepielli is a Philadelphia based artist and member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Sepielli received his BFA from Tyler in 2003 and has exhibited his work at various locations locally and elsewhere. This is his first solo exhibition.