Mnemonic Abrasions
Essay written for the catalogue of Matthew Casha’s debut solo exhibition Tmermir (2024).
Vedo fiori uscir fuori dai muri.
Fatti di petali e di calce,
di bianco e di luce.
Li vedo rivelarsi da fondi azzurri,
che sono insieme
di cielo e di pietra.
G. Celiberti, I segni dell’anima, 50
From the harsh and seemingly indestructible rocks we sometimes see life sprouting forth. Moss, bushes and sometimes even small flowers make their way out of tiny crevices. The eroding rock, a sign of age, decay and disintegration becomes a cove for life to germinate. A repurposing of loss and destruction, for something new (if only finite) to emerge.
In Matthew Casha’s first solo exhibition we start to get a glimpse of an artist who at the dawn of his artistic journey is not afraid to navigate inside the flux of change and transformation. In Tmermir we see no attempt to freeze the passage of time but to accentuate its flow.
Erosion, from the latin ex-rodere is descriptive of a process that speaks of something being gnawed away. Indeed, something is always lost when air, water, wind and ice gnaw away at immense landscapes. However, erosion also opens possibilities, lays the groundwork for new things to embed themselves in the hollow crevices of the land and the human spirit.
Matthew’s work is rich in gestures that create lesions in the canvas. Before the paint, the glue and the sand are allowed to properly set, they are scratched and brushed away. We do not see a nihilist that compulsively destroys signs of meaning, but an archeologist that patiently (if sometimes violently) uncovers layers of memory. The wounded canvas as in Via Fiume exudes a protological light that has been waiting to be uncovered.
Tmermir is also a pilgrimage along roads paved by restless feet. Away from the sterility of perfectly paved tarmac roads that express rigidity, stability and uniformity, we are taken along for walks on countryside roads that speak of unevenness, winding passages and a richness of colour that only nature in its brute creativity can design. Some of these works get their names from vie/roads but are more truly invisible landscapes. As such they capture memories, passages and events like the city of Zaira, which in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, is a city that consists of “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past”. Zaira does not tell its past but “contains it like the lines of a hand… every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls” (City and Memory III).
Matthew’s architectural roots come to the fore in his sensibility to materials and their ability to become tools in the artist’s hand even in their worn-out state. There is an underlying principle of entropy in the tools and materials that make up his works. An old brush, a blunt scalpel or an old cloth – all destined to become forgotten trash – become sentinels to a world that wants to forget its past while forging blindly its future. Even Matthew’s decision to use sand is symbolically resonant with the overarching theme of this exhibition. Itself a product of erosion over millions of years, it becomes the materia prima for his landscapes, fossilized dunes that still retain their ephemeral nature.
On the flatness of the canvas Matthew explores the eternal interplay of space and time, how materials communicate the passage of time, but also how the latter takes hold of matter as in Via Salita Specula, molding it from within and without. A brief walk through Via Carruba is in dialectical relationship with the millenarian geological processes that leave behind ruins laden with fossils. No ruin is lost in the netherworld, because even from the “ruins of what was and is no more, new words, spaces, and relationships are condensed” (Anselm Kiefer, L’Arte soppriviverà alle sue rovine).
Like the palimpsests of antiquity (from the Greek palin: again, and psaō scrape) Matthew’s gestures scrape away at the surface to reveal something more profound, more fundamental. The fragmented topographical sediments of Via Fiume are suggestive of memories that have become vague and precarious, but are more real because of what has been “destroyed, scratched off and fit to be seen” (Gerhard Richter, Painting after all).
In their ephemerality, Matthew’s works are a resistance against amnesia. Even if what remains is “the wind in our faces,” that very wind carries the origins of long-formed waves full of an energy that these works seem to contain. In the finiteness of materials and limitedness of reality, art remains a “liberation of the spirit… a presence and reconciliation of the Absolute in what is apparent and visible” (Hegel, Aesthetics).
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
Going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
A gesture waves us on
Answering our wave…
But what we feel
is the wind in our faces.
Ranier Maria Rilke, A Walk.
