Matthew Girson: Plot Structure catalogue with a signed limited edition print by Matthew Girson. In conjunction with the Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery Exhibition, Plot Structure, November 13 - December 30, 2022.

Essays by Anne Harris and Matthew Girson

Design by Jason Pickleman

Reflections on Facts and Fictions

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

–Excerpted from Mirror by Sylvia Plath

Matthew Girson’s recent paintings are mirrors. I mean this literally. Actual mirrors are embedded. Silver paints are used. These mimic surfaces ranging from chrome to pewter. The paint is used to depict muted interiors which abut the actual mirrors. These show us the actual interiors we stand in, and our reflected selves, peering into the painting, trying to sort out what we see.

Matthew’s paintings are also mirrors, metaphorically. The illusory sensation of space is the physical depth of a mirror—that fraction of an inch suspended between the surface of the glass and the silvered backing. The images are oddly flat, pressed back at us, impassive and neutral. Every reflected millimeter is equal.

These are also experiential mirrors, capturing many reflective possibilities, from breath-steamed, to satin-finished, to sparklingly clear. But they’re at odds with the traditional expected fiction of painting, that paintings are like windows, not mirrors.

We expect to look through a painting as we do a window. The window pane is the picture plane; the world of the painting exists behind that plane. But Matthew’s painted world slides against that plane. It lives where our world meets its opposite. He paints the moment of reflected flip, the liminal shimmer.

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The Larry Bookbinder paintings are windows. We look through them and see painterly interpretations of observed objects on surfaces. Described by Matthew, “They are small (and odd?) windows into densely filled, colorful, bright, reflective narrow spaces.” Understood this way, they are part of the tradition of perceptual still-life painting, in conversation with Chardin, Cezanne, and more recent painters like Albert York and Lois Dodd. These artists work interpretively from life, using paint as a sensory thing, each mark a felt response to specific observation.

The Bookbinder paintings can be read this way; however, adding one contextual fact changes everything. Larry Bookbinder, himself, is a metaphor. He is part of a layered story whose characters include both Bookbinder and the paintings. When we know this, these paintings flip from windows to mirrors. They reflect their actual maker, who is obsessed with shifting fact to fiction and back again.

The mirror is his subject, muse and metaphor. It holds both fact and fiction at once. Light bounces off its surface to reflect the world and ourselves, while holding the window’s experience—that we look through it to see another world. This embodies an essential human trait, that we reflect upon our existence through metaphor and story-telling.

—Anne Harris, curator