Matthew F Fisher

"Man looks at the world and the world does not look at him."

–Alain Robbe-Grillet [1]

Ochi Projects is pleased to present Matthew F Fisher: Seas, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Seas presents a dozen new paintings by artist Matthew F Fisher. Compact in scale, each painting depicts the shore, a continuation of an ongoing body of work. As water meets land or sand or doesn’t, Fisher occasionally proffers a seashell, a reflection, grass, celestial bodies, or atmospheric conditions—but nothing happens and that is the point. Is it possible to make a painting about nothing? Like a paradoxical riddle, Fisher’s paintings allude to the inadequacy of logical reasoning in relation to memory—two nearly identical paintings of waves are titled Freedom of Emptiness and History of Books (both 2021).

Fisher paints slowly with small brushes and translucent washes, he then approximates sand by flicking grains of acrylic paint gently across a finite surface using toothbrushes reclaimed from city streets. Sapphire, sea foam, turquoise, cerulean, ultramarine, and indigo—from time to time variations of the sky and sea are divided by parallel white lines that bend, curve, or even shape themselves into a cresting wave. For Fisher, representations of water in motion is not that different from stillness, lending an existential accuracy to the haziness of perception. Waves never stand still for long enough to remember what they look like. They don’t stop until they reach the beach and stop existing. Fisher’s Seas echoes a lesson penned by bestselling author Stephen R. Covey [2]: “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are—or, as we are conditioned to see it.”

Matthew F Fisher (b. 1976, Boston, MA) lives and works in New York, NY. His recent solo exhibitions include The Great Fire, Shrine, New York, NY (2020); After the Ice, Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK (2019); Soft Nature, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Strange Light, Over Under Room, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Into the Blue, Johansson Projects, Oakland, CA (2018); and Observable Universe, Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York, NY (2017). Fisher’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including The Hole, New York, NY; Spazio 22, Milan, Italy; Work Release, Norfolk, VA; and The Breeder, Athens, Greece. Fisher is the recipient of residencies and awards including a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2016), Yaddo (2015, 2007), a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship (2010), and the Millay Colony for the Arts (2005). He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (2000) and his BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design (1998).

1 - Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) was a French writer and filmmaker associated with the Nouveau Roman genre in the 1960s.

2 - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® was published in 1989.