Frances Matassa - VillageOneArt

Brooklyn-based figurative painter

Born in Seattle in 1994 and now based in Brooklyn, Frances Matassa is a figurative painter concerned with trauma, memory, and dissociation, and with the porous boundary between what happens inside a person and what shows on the outside. Her large-scale canvases place figures within landscapes suspended between dream and waking life, yielding images that read as both tender and unsettling.

Two kinds of figures recur across the body of work: some adrift, their gazes carrying the flicker of memories only half-held, and others anchored, present in small sensory moments — the weight of grass underfoot, the drone of insects at dusk. Coming back to oneself, in Matassa’s paintings, is never a clean arrival; it is tinged with the strange feeling of returning to a place that should be familiar but no longer quite is.

Insects move again and again through her canvases, standing in quietly for change, decay, and remembering. The moth, pulled always toward light, becomes a figure for looking outward — even as its own glow hints that what is being searched for may have been there, unnoticed, all along.

Matassa earned her BFA at Hunter College and has held two solo exhibitions at VillageOneArt, in 2023 and 2025. Her paintings have also been shown in group exhibitions at Harsh Collective (2024) and Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery (2023), both in New York, and featured in the fifteenth issue of New Visionary Magazine (2025) and at the 2023 Volta Art Fair.