January 23 – March 1, 2025
“The boundaries of reality blur into the surreal,” Matassa noted, “reflect(ing) upon the fragility of those moments when…the world feels both intimate and distant, solid and ephemeral.”
How do we connect with nature? What observations about the world around us do we internalize and how do we find magic and wonder in our surroundings? These were just a few of the questions posed by the exhibit Frances Matassa: When The Moon Turns Green. For the artist’s second solo show with the gallery, she delved into dreamlike experiences that manifested like fever dreams across the canvas. With a view toward the surreal and otherworldly, Matassa evoked both the real world and dream states with equal aplomb.
An evocative color palette and luminescent glow infused these nocturnal compositions with a suffusive mystery. Figures throughout the paintings appeared imbued with subterfuge, with contorted bodies and faces rife with emotion. The paintings showed figures, natural elements and structures depicted in a heightened sense of realism and shrouded in veils of shifting light. Works like In Murky Waters and Murmur Of The Woods presented figures hidden in part within natural environments, camouflaged into blossoms or ponds and absorbed into these surroundings.
This enmeshment of figure indicated where “the boundaries of reality blur into the surreal,” as Matassa noted, “reflect(ing) upon the fragility of those moments when…the world feels both intimate and distant, solid and ephemeral.” This intrinsic link between figure and landscape was most potent in the diptych Paper Moon, with a prone figure being subsumed into the grassy earth beneath. Matassa’s often life-size paintings of female figures liberated and celebrated women’s bodies and summoned a sensuality both intimate and universal. These figures alternately embodied confidence and confusion, speaking to the agency and power women hold in their bodies or approximating the confusion and dissipation of that confidence when this agency is violated. Matassa pointed to the luminescent moth as a symbol: a harbinger of disorientation and yearning that hinted at “the journey of turning inward,” the artist reflected, “…and finding healing in the body.” This release of tension and return toward a sense of being whole with our environment through a solid grounding of the body within place spoke to the uplifting motifs present within these paintings. A thoroughly magnetic exhibit, Matassa was able to unlock the heightened sense of mystery present in our daily lives by stimulating the viewer’s natural sense of curiosity and wonder. Visitors to Frances Matassa: When The Moon Turns Green did not soon forget this compelling and singular exhibition.
Works in the Exhibition
When The Moon Turns Green was on view at VillageOneArt, 150 West 25th Street, Suite 403, New York, from January 23 to March 1, 2025. For inquiries regarding available works by Frances Matassa, please contact info@villageoneart.com.