Upon first encountering Matthew Kolodziej’s wonderful artwork at Carl Solway Gallery’s Patch Work: New Paintings show (through Saturday), you might think he’s reviving the colorfully splattering, helter-skelter Abstract-Expressionist style of Jackson Pollock. But first appearances can be deceiving.
He explains, in answer to an inquiry, that he starts the paintings by putting together photo collages of places he’s seen that are in a state of transition. He then puts those through an illustrator program that turns them into line drawings, often with altered images.
These are projected onto a canvas and traced out with brushes. He uses a combination of modeling pastes and acrylics applied with putty knives to build up the paintings. He sometimes traces over lines with heavy gels to create a raised surface where paint can be filled in.
So there are concrete origins, actual images, to his work — it isn’t non-objective. You can see they’re rooted in some kind of place, and you can establish a perspective that gives definition and even a sense of kaleidoscopic movement to the canvases.
This is most clearly and thrillingly evident in the fantastic “Shanty,” an acrylic painting. As you study its mosaic-like structure, you begin to sense you’re getting an overview of a crowded town on a mountainside, like in Rio, with a beltway of trees and strip of water beyond (at the top of the canvas).
It’s a breathtakingly beautiful painting, and the show has other excellent ones, too, like “Blaze” and “Diode.”
Kolodziej is an art professor at University of Akron. One hopes there will be more shows of his demanding, rewarding work at Solway.
For more information, visit solwaygallery.com.
This article appears in Mar 23-30, 2016.