AARON ARYADHARMA MATHESON

A Flickering Lamp, a Phantom and a Dream

1 October - 31 October

In conversation, Aaron Aryadharma Matheson is as unhurried as he is in painting, with the same ability to turn the simplest elements of language, spoken or pictorial, into conveyances of feeling and insight. Visiting him in his studio while he was working on the paintings in this exhibition, he said something so plain yet penetrating, I am still turning it over in my mind months later: “I do want my work to be broken open, or to break you open.” While there is nothing unusual in an artist aspiring to openness, the word ‘broken’ took me by surprise. 

Things and people break under pressure. Nobody hopes to be broken by life, but Aryadharma’s words, voiced more as a floating thought than a hard declaration, affirmed the value, perhaps the necessity of failure as a formative element in our lives. To be open, he was saying, we first need to break, a truth of life that is borne out in our experience of art. 

He understands this more keenly than most of us. For 15 years Aryadharma has lived with Multiple Sclerosis, a condition that has turned his life upside down and changed him as a painter. The slow, unstoppable juggernaut which steals the body’s mobility has forced him to work less laboriously and with a lighter touch than he was previously accustomed to. It has become ever more difficult to commence and complete the large paintings he loves to make, yet in the last five years he has made the best paintings of his life. He evokes entire realms with nothing more than veiled colour and the awareness that it is time to let go. This exhibition of new paintings encompasses the subjects, ideas and forms that we now know him for. There are paintings of auratic orbs, celestial in atmosphere yet charged with human touch; coastlines where matter is confounded in vapour; and human bodies, rarely given in their entirety, tapering into nothingness. Any sense of finality is deferred, as though the painting and its depicted world have been found at a point of transformation between states: broken open and infinite, emanating light. 

Joe Frost