The Shaped Visions of Mark Lewis and Matthew Lopas
On an exhibition of the artists in New York City.
“Mark Lewis & Matthew Lopas: Shape of Vision” runs through November 12, 2022 at THERE in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. The gallery is open by appointment only; contact them at (917) 687-7368 or admin@zeuxis.us. The following essay was commissioned by the artists. Images are copyright and appear courtesy of the artists. More information about them can be found at the website of Mark Lewis and the Painting Perceptions interview with Matthew Lopas.
Mark Lewis and Matthew Lopas have in common a practice of working in front of the motif, in a manner that would be recognizable to anyone who has ever seen a plein air painter at his foldable easel, studying the landscape with a box of oils. The resemblance ends there, as Lewis is working with paper collage at outsize scales, and Lopas paints on panels clamped into an assemblage in an attempt to capture a panorama of the scene. (He pieces them together afterwards in his wood shop.) Unlike the typical dauber in the field, who knows where the painting is going to end – at the four edges of his canvas – Lewis and Lopas keep expanding until the irregular extent of their works and their content justify one another.
Why not shoot some photographs and work in the comfort of indoors, from reference, unmolested by wind and rain? Because nowhere do difficulty and desire intersect quite like they do in the real world. People who draw know this. You can set up a still life and find a universe therein if you’re inclined. Outdoors, with the light changing and people walking past in bemusement at the artists and their improbable setups, it’s universes within universes. Even if the subject was a lawn and a simple house, such as in Lopas’s Front Yard (2021), or a common stepladder like the one in Lewis’s Staring Before an Ordinary Day (2022), you would never be able to imagine them into existence – the details are too numerous and you can only notice them a few at a time.
Lewis is the more straightforward pictorialist of the two artists, in that his pictures correlate fairly well with the perspective system of traditional Western painting. That said, the tin ceiling of Studio (2022) is buckling heavenward from the pressure of observation. Point in fact, traditional perspective only feels natural near the horizon line. Lewis’s rendering of the space overhead, through its distortions, maintains that naturalness. Hints of the artist’s presence pop up in the complexity of books and storage tubes, in the form of self-portraits that he has placed around the room. That this is all cut pieces of gray paper is a marvel; it registers as realism, Cubism, or collage depending on what attitude of attention the viewer brings to it.
Lopas is engaging in the kind looking that is possible through a panoramic camera, up to a point – a camera would not be able to capture such plurality of views in a single scene, nor cohere them. Lopas, who has studied the technology of cylcoramas and is known in the community of aficionados of such things, has applied it to the patently human act of painting. The bending observed in Lewis’s Studio is occurring across all three axes in Dining Room and Deck (2021). Curiously, while the whole presentation is turbulently warped, closer transitions, from the houseplant to the window beside it or the floor to the deck outside, feel comfortable and habitable. The paint handling is lively, more dynamic than his spatial pyrotechnics would seem to allow, and that too creates a heartfelt sense of place despite the strangeness.
Freedom is of utmost importance to art, but in practice it consists mostly of choosing what kind of shackles you will clamp around your ankles. If work in the studio feels too easy too much of the time, an artist with integrity will wonder if he is taking on adequate challenges. Furthermore, not just any challenge will do. It must be a challenge that promises to reveal something not yet seen, or not yet seen in its particular way. Not even the artist can know entirely what form that revelation will take, only that it may be worth the attempt. Both Lewis and Lopas have found ways to encounter that productive resistance, and make the everyday world come alive.