Mathew Cerletty creates eerie hyperrealist portraits of everyday objects
The idealized household objects of New York-based painter Matthew Cerletty (born 1980), scaled up and isolated on single color backgrounds, float in a purified, contaminant-free space. The objects are familiar, even jokingly so, but resist apprehension. Cerletty's subjects always return a scrutinizing gaze, seeking connection with a viewer who might catalyze the work's completion. As Chris Sharp writes, "How to account for the work in Mathew Cerletty's
Full Length Mirror
? What drives this artist to paint these things? What could possibly impel him to depict a jet ski, a green ottoman, a brown leather belt, a laundry rack or white ceiling molding with such bright, marvelously matter-of-fact and painstaking realism? The funny thing about this is that the natural inclination to solving this mystery is not necessarily to dwell upon a single painting or drawing, but to look at another, and then another, in hopes of shaking out the fils rouges between them. It's as if they, not individually, but as a sequence, are supposed to gradually disclose their enigma, rebus-like, collectively yielding it up like a decoded secret. And yet the more you glance between the works, the more opaque, enigmatic and inscrutable they are liable to become."