Matt Kleberg: Bless Babel

In Bless Babel, each painting builds around a singular central niche, suggesting the absence of a subject. Confronted with this vacancy, the viewer finds themselves at the center of Kleberg’s geometric abstractions. Influenced by architectural and ritualistic spaces, the works in Bless Babel investigate the tropes through which conception is framed by institutional or personal belief. Kleberg’s paintings are not interested in objective truth, but rather in how belief transforms our relationship to space and objects. These paintings are not portals, unless you believe they are. They are not windows, unless you believe they are. 

This exhibition derives its title from Donald Barthelme’s 1987 essay Not Knowing, in which the writer and critic considers uncertainty, improvisation, and discovery as fundamental to the creative act. Barthelme speaks of commentary, elaboration, exegesis, and contradiction as necessary modes of engagement between a piece of art and the earlier works of previous makers that inform it. Babel and the scattering of languages offer an example of how different approaches to the same concept are inherent to human expression. Kleberg’s new paintings embrace the constraints of particular shapes borrowed from Tramp Art frames and Italian Renaissance devotional objects, to explore how different resolutions can come out of multiple iterations of the same motifs.

Kleberg’s paintings contradict themselves, oscillating between ecstasy and oblivion, exuberance and tranquility. Hues of pink, terracotta, and bright blue radiate amongst moody browns, maroon, and sap green. Scumbled surfaces complicate illusionistic shadows; interior space collapses into itself as one moves closer. Shimmering like television static or speckled concrete, colors that appear solid break apart upon inspection. Chromatic undertones shift in their nature–perhaps waiting to coalesce. Some paintings tower, their stripes and bands undulating, monumental and inviting, formal yet playful. Indebted as much to American folk art traditions as to Duccio and the Sienese School, Kleberg’s paintings pay homage—yet with their vacancies and their tensions, the drama is of their own conjuring. A frame within a frame within a frame. The pleasure is in the not-knowing. 

Matt Kleberg was born in 1985 in Kingsville, Texas. He received his BA from the University of Virginia in 2008 and his MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2015. Coverage of his work can be found in various publications, including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Artsy, Vice, Maake Magazine, ArtDaily, Juxtapoz Magazine, Square Cylinder, and Hyperallergic. His work is featured in multiple private and public collections, including the Williams College Museum of Art, the AD&A Museum of the University of California Santa Barbara, the Old Jail Art Center, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the National Gallery of Art. Kleberg currently lives and works in San Antonio, TX.