Review of Matt Kleberg: Bless Babel

The voids at the center of Matt Kleberg’s paintings and drawings call to mind Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist play Six Characters in Search of an Author. Like those characters, who possess all the ingredients for drama except the driving motor of an authored plot, Kleberg’s abstractions of pictureless frames, reflectionless mirrors, and relic-free altars seem to cry out for images and objects to fill their emptiness with narrative. That tension between absence and the yearning for completion gave the thirteen shaped canvases, all from 2025, in his exhibition “Bless Babel” at Berggruen a heightened conceptual charge. The artist based them on sources both high- and lowbrow, from late medieval/early Renaissance altarpieces to early-twentieth-century “tramp art” wood carvings. At the crux of each painting, rectilinear compartments—rendered with illusionistic shadows to imply an unseen light source—suggested a holiday gift or Amazon box unwrapped and gutted clean or, perhaps more bleakly, never filled to begin with. Bracketing and emanating outward from these bereft containers were linear patterns or shapes reminiscent of fabric, as in Ecstatic Exit (Pinstripe) and Loom (Saddle Blanket), or suggestive of nautical designs, as in Reflection (Maritime Hotel). Seafaring associations were carried over in Coral Corral and Frame (Bless Babel), whose thick vertical and horizontal stripes evoke the “dazzle” camouflage painted onto warships during World Wars I and II.

The medium of oil stick on canvas imparted a flat, waxy finish across the works that, combined with the compositions’ unwavering neo-Palladian symmetry, lent their imposing presences an austere feeling. The circles grounding and capping the outer contours of Frame (Rosso) and Four Corners stood like stern exclamation points in some archaic language, forewarning consequences of unauthorized trespassing. Sharp points triangulated atop the aforementioned Ecstatic Exit (Pinstripe) and Loom (Saddle Blanket) rose like spikes atop a knight’s halberd, further barring entry. Mitigating this inhospitable air, a palette of cheery pinks, cerulean, and other Play-Doh hues allowed a measure of whimsy to slip in where eyes might otherwise fear to glance. Far from monolithic, the color was variegated, speckled, and scumbled in thin, uneven layers for an excavated-looking effect, as if revealing pentimenti.

Strongly architectonic, the works channeled Kleberg’s interest in Sienese architecture and painting. He counts the exhibition “Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300–1350,” especially the panel paintings of Duccio, which he saw at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in December 2024, as a significant inspiration. The preponderance of stripes, not only in larger works but also in a quartet of smaller pieces, recalled the marble exterior and interior of the Siena Cathedral but also the striped pastiche of postmodernist buildings such as Charles Moore’s 1978 Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans and Michael Graves’s 1982 Portland Buildingin Oregon. Two untitled grids of oil-stick studies on paper—hung in groups of twelve and twenty-five, respectively—functioned as blueprints for the finished paintings, conceived as variations on a handful of foundational motifs. As the studies attested, Kleberg doesn’t shy from iterative strategies. In fact, the exhibition’s title—invoking the philological origin story of the Tower of Babel, in which one language gave way to many—alluded to his transmution of a single gestalt into myriad variants. “E pluribus unum” was inverted to “Ex uno plures.”

For all their surfeit of architectural and art-historical paraphrase, what remained most conspicuous about the paintings was what was lacking inside the shadowed vacuums of their boxy hearts. Artists have long made statements through omission: Tom Wesselmann’s eyeless, noseless sexpots, Sam Francis’s evocative white space between judicious spatters of color, or Karen LaMonte’s gowns and kimonos devoid of human figures. Kleberg’s framing devices, framing nothing, dared viewers to find the bare stage sufficient, no actors or sets required. Surprisingly or not, the gambit worked. As in John Cage’s ever-radical 4’33”, structure itself carried the day: artifice without artifact.

Moreover, “Bless Babel” resonated poignantly in the context of our current era of disappearance. Websites and the knowledge they preserve disappear from web searches with the ascendance of AI; opera, symphony, and museum patrons move on to sexier pastimes, leaving empty halls in their wakes; life skills and passions such as handwriting, correspondence, and reading fiction become obsolete, to say nothing of banned books vanishing from shelves, the firing of professors accused of wokeness, Spanish speakers winding up in detention centers and deported, and the specter of democratic norms vaporizing with every news cycle. Kleberg’s canvases embody the zeitgeist’s sinister vacuity but also its candy-striped naïveté even in the face of sociopolitical unraveling. Their repeated iconic forms hold forth with talismanic authority, unbudging and defiantly upbeat.