Matthew Heller: Everything is a Love Story at DCA Fine Art

Los Angeles painter Matthew Heller is on the verge of making it big; the thick lines and vibrancy of his trademark lexicon of sensual,roughly-formed nudes in silhouette have garnered increasing attention from critics and collectors, and inspired near-fanatical devotion among his fans. Which is why his most recent show, “Everything is a Love Story,” is so refreshing. Half a dozen mini-series riff on aspects of romance, his enduring topic, and in each of these he takes a fresh risk. The expansiveness of his technique indicates an earnest desire to push his own boundaries and leave his comfort zone. It doesn’t always work - the test-only pieces fall flat and passages of extreme expressivity are here-and-there disruptive and distracting rather than eloquent - but more often it succeeds.

“Love Story Strangers Fiction” and the related “This is a Test” series (all 2007) are done on black backgrounds and feature the silhouetted figures, curt text, and rough-hewn graffiti flavor familiar to fans of his previous work but in a darker, more muscular hand. They form something of a transitional moment, with multi-panel friezes such as “A Beautiful Disaster” and “The Adoration of Young Lovers” indicating an emerging refinement of his compositional ambitions and deepening of his literary impulses. Using a more fraught and complicated symbolism including skulls, crowds of figures, abstract architectural elements, color fields and more variety in brushwork, move the narrative convincingly and completely. They are character arcs, not snapshots.

“Series B”, especially “Naive yes, Stupid No,” introduces a whole new direction for Heller, quantum physics. Into the vagaries of romantic misadventure and self-discovery, Heller folds free-floating atomic signs, geometrical representations of the fourth dimension and references to theories (especially String Theory) about parallel universes. It works well, adding variety, surprise and mystery both in form and content. Brian Greene wrote in his seminal and notably accessible volume on String Theory that “The most accurate measuring devices in the world confirm that space and time are not experienced identically by everyone. Einstein’s special relativity theory resolves the conflict between our intuition about motion and the properties of light, but there is a price: individuals who are moving with respect to each other will not agree on their observations.” Apparently, one doesn’t have to be a physicist mapping and parsing the properties of the universe to sense the truth of this statement - one needs only to have been in love.

– Shana Nys Dambrot

Matthew Heller: Everything is a Love Story at DCA Fine Art

Los Angeles painter Matthew Heller is on the verge of making it big; the thick lines and vibrancy of his trademark lexicon of sensual,roughly-formed nudes in silhouette have garnered increasing attention from critics and collectors, and inspired near-fanatical devotion among his fans. Which is why his most recent show, “Everything is a Love Story,” is so refreshing. Half a dozen mini-series riff on aspects of romance, his enduring topic, and in each of these he takes a fresh risk. The expansiveness of his technique indicates an earnest desire to push his own boundaries and leave his comfort zone. It doesn’t always work - the test-only pieces fall flat and passages of extreme expressivity are here-and-there disruptive and distracting rather than eloquent - but more often it succeeds.

“Love Story Strangers Fiction” and the related “This is a Test” series (all 2007) are done on black backgrounds and feature the silhouetted figures, curt text, and rough-hewn graffiti flavor familiar to fans of his previous work but in a darker, more muscular hand. They form something of a transitional moment, with multi-panel friezes such as “A Beautiful Disaster” and “The Adoration of Young Lovers” indicating an emerging refinement of his compositional ambitions and deepening of his literary impulses. Using a more fraught and complicated symbolism including skulls, crowds of figures, abstract architectural elements, color fields and more variety in brushwork, move the narrative convincingly and completely. They are character arcs, not snapshots.

“Series B”, especially “Naive yes, Stupid No,” introduces a whole new direction for Heller, quantum physics. Into the vagaries of romantic misadventure and self-discovery, Heller folds free-floating atomic signs, geometrical representations of the fourth dimension and references to theories (especially String Theory) about parallel universes. It works well, adding variety, surprise and mystery both in form and content. Brian Greene wrote in his seminal and notably accessible volume on String Theory that “The most accurate measuring devices in the world confirm that space and time are not experienced identically by everyone. Einstein’s special relativity theory resolves the conflict between our intuition about motion and the properties of light, but there is a price: individuals who are moving with respect to each other will not agree on their observations.” Apparently, one doesn’t have to be a physicist mapping and parsing the properties of the universe to sense the truth of this statement - one needs only to have been in love.

– Shana Nys Dambrot