Matthew Metzger: The Interrogative Remainder

Matthew Metzger’s subject is abstraction, but he excavates his motifs from the world of everyday things. His paintings of ping pong paddles, tattered paperbacks, scratched out lp sleeves, and other disregarded objects catalog the contents of basements, garages, closets, and attics. These outmoded objects, rendered with both deafening surface precision and also the vocabulary of abstraction, appear to pose a contemporary method of meaning making. Accessed through the tools of representation, the legibility of abstraction is scrambled and defamiliarized. As such, Metzger’s work emerges between present and past, theoretical and sensorial, real and falsified, the recognizable and the obscure.