After an atom bomb strikes its target, there’s a moment before victims are blown out of their shoes or blasted onto a wall as carbon shadows. Call it a soul flash. Matthew Offenbacher paints its presence in daily life. He paints it as a cat turns its head, flowers start to die in a vase and a fish, turning in its watery gyre, sustains the universe.
In acrylic and oil on treated cotton, each in the series on view at Howard House is 52 by 45 inches. None has a title, which is a shame. Offenbacher’s titles are worth collecting on their own, such as, from this painting from 2007, Recognizing the diligence with which death approaches, and trying to recognize also the desirability of her arrival, and to take advantage of such recognition.
Offenbacher is mildly mystical in an early-20th century vein, modest but aspiring to consequence, hopeful that there is a key and a mystery it will unlock.
Earlier paintings looked burrowed into existence, woven and bulging slightly along each line as if there were a roden beneath it, pushing up dirt.
Currently, lines are fractured and color smeared, bringing to mind the early paintings of Joseph Raffael, unfortunately not online. His later work is so decorative it’s hard for anyone who wasn’t in the Bay Area in the late 60s to believe that it ever mattered at all, and yet all my life I’ve remembered a painting of a man with birds in his turban, they and he living together in perfect, light-struck calm.
I doubt Offenbacher will take the same route. He’s too (for lack of a better word) smart. Even if given the chance to live in a fine house for becoming a shadow of himself, he wouldn’t take it. Unlike Raffael, what interests him is what art can deliver, not what are can illustrate.
Through Oct. 31.
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