In Chilean artist Vicente Matte’s paintings, figures glide and float through hazy, coloured landscapes. The rounded shapes of their bodies mirror those of their surroundings, their expressions and actions not revealing where they’ve been or where they’re going.

For his first solo exhibition in London at MAMOTH, Matte represents human beings caught between individualism and collectivity. In those paintings portraying multiple figures, the landscape sometimes appears to take over as the main protagonist, their bodies swaying between planes of colour, as in the case of Nightfall stones (2022).

Among other paintings is the close-up of a figure gazing into their phone, titled Bedtime (2022), the weight of solitude translated into a series of distinct shapes.

Whether vast landscapes or intimate scenes such as these, Matte succeeds in creating a feeling of expanse, where details are expressed as full, rounded forms.

In this fullness, Matte stamps the irrevocable passing of time. It is a process of distillation; of ‘moving into a place where there are no answers’, to transform colour and light into shapes that shift between abstraction and figuration. Matte views these shapes as projections, referencing American painter Amy Sillman, who said that ‘your shadow is your personal shape.’

To Matte, ‘Shadows are nothing but a projection of something’—an expansion that gives a quiet monumentality to his projections, which sit at the intersection between past, present, and future. ‘These works don’t explain anything,’ Matte asserts. ‘They are above all, questions.’

Rendered in distemper and oil, their surfaces reflect processes of layering and removal, amounting to a temporal density. Created in a self-built studio at the bottom of Matte’s garden in Santiago de Chile, these paintings embody the fluid interconnection between art and life and the fullness of experience, with all its joys, frustrations, and everything in between.

Tessa Moldan. 2022

Film: Vicente Matte at Studio

Vicente Matte welcomes to his studio to talk about his painting, which he sees as a projection of a past time, of an idea or an instance that is remembered on canvas. Working with wide shapes and whispering colours, he takes inspiration from his own family memories as well as popular motives and narratives belonging to South American culture. Matte’s paintings are an enigma, a device which, as the artist puts it, “…these works don’t explain anything, they are, above all, questions.” –MAMOTH