Cold as Ice

Renata Fabbri is pleased to announce the exhibition Cold as Ice by Matt McClune (Worcester, Massachusetts – 1973), the artist’s first solo show at the gallery.

This American artist, who has been living in France for some years now, presents a series of new paintings conceived specifically for the gallery.

Matt McClune’s characteristic style is expressed through the use of metal surfaces as a base for varying painting modalities, poised between figurative and abstract art, distinguished by a color scheme made up of rarefied light and atmospheres, often inspired by the changing seasons in the French countryside, in Burgundy, where he lives and works.

Cold as Ice is about the winter. The works on display stand out for their cold colors, like blue, white, and silver. They light up the gallery space and accompany the viewer towards an enchanting, unique, rarefied, and evocative atmosphere.

The artist narrates that in winter the vineyards in Burgundy blanketed in thick fog transform the setting, which inevitably becomes quite gloomy; and yet, by looking beyond the grayness, one comes across a cold and fascinating light.

This is a seemingly asceptic, emotionless light, just as coldness appears, though it finds expressivity and purity in this dimension.

In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant outlines a parallel between beauty and the sublime. While the former is perceived through the senses and the intellect, the latter is perceived by the soul. And it is precisely the soul that is stimulated by his art. Matt McClune is able to render greatly evocative paintings where one finds “he who looks,” that is, a kind of looking immortalized in its relationship with the place, the place of our soul.