26 Feb 2019

Matt Bollinger: Three Rooms

Zürcher Gallery

Reviewed by William Corwin

Matt Bollinger renders the way in which light cuts into a space with an elegiac but precise hand, forcing the viewer to focus on the phantom silhouettes, refractions, and reflections. Though his flashe and acrylic interiors and still-lifes are muted with intense and sharply defined bursts of color, he convinces our eyes with the multitude of hues and tints that lurk in the shade.

Their Daughter's Room 1 and 2 (both are 2018) offer the same domestic topography from two viewpoints shifted by 90 degrees, and transformed by the changing light. These canvases can be still to the point of stifling, but the artist has concocted a Tarkovskyesque narrative that luxuriates in its slow pace. A stop-motion animation tells a story of a hazmat-suited figure examining the space. Even without this cue we are naturally drawn to details, the transubstantiation of materials in light. Bollinger indulges both us and his visitor from a future dystopia, lining his shelves with oddly shaped books and filling tabletops with cases of mycological samples.