NEW YORK: RIVINGTON ARMS
Mathew Cerletty
27 February – 4 April 2003

Distinguished by his raw talent and the candour of the gazes he depicts, Mathew Cerletty’s debut show of realist portraits is striking.
The oil, Suicide Babe, shows a woman lying half-clothed on a mattress, her hands by her hips and her feet tilting to the sides. Painted from a bird’s-eye view and with a flattened perspective, the work recalls Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, and the comparison is not limited to this painting. Cerletty’s works share a larger theme with the Mexican artist: her sexual narcissism. He is his own perpetual subject, and the portraits excel at capturing the twinges of anxiety, forthrightness and stupefaction that appear in varying combinations on his pale, high-cheekboned face. With red-rimmed eyes, Cerletty seems caught in an overly bright version of everyday life – brushing his teeth with fluorescent pink toothpaste, wearing a coral sweatshirt (and nothing else) against turquoise brocaded wallpaper.
The works’ settings are as suggestive as the faces, but breezier and lighter in tone. Elements wittily fold into one another, giving the background an economy of motifs that forces attention on the faces. Flowers from the wallpaper above Cerletty’s shoulders in Last Chance Dance, for example, reappear in his breast pocket and boutonnière as he sits alone by a mirror in the corner. In Interior, the Rape (After Degas), everything is striped – the bed, the wallpaper, the rug – while mirrors on the wall project inexact reflections of the original prints.
This background arrangement of heightened colour and distorted patterns shows Cerletty cautiously toying with the illusion of space; at the same time, the figures in the foreground hold close a narrative and psychological realism like that of Philip Pearlstein. In the best works, these two differing techniques create an atmosphere of both unreality and emotional immediacy.
One of the show’s most layered works is a painting of Cerletty’s father in the bath. The elder Cerletty sits surrounded by kitschy floral wallpaper whose pattern is reflected in the tub water and echoed by the flowers outside the window. A double hit of artistic patricide – Agamemnon plus emasculation by way of feminine décor – might be too much to read into the work, but Cerletty deserves the benefit of the doubt. Only 23, this show proves him to be a thoughtful and promising artist.

Melissa Gronlund