Mathew Cerletty

Painter Mathew Cerletty applies hyper-realistic precision to the most banal and unremarkable subjects that populate his life–from corporate logos, to cinder block walls, to Ikea furniture. In the vein of surrealists like René Magritte, his non-sequitur paintings present the familiar as peculiar. He often achieves this peculiarity with hard to pinpoint incongruencies, as in

Ikea

(2010) where shadows are exaggerated and surfaces are rendered excessively shiny.


Cerletty develops ideas for a painting with simple premises such as “wiggling pink paper,” or “mailman in love," asking himself, “Is it funny? Does it work?" He does so with an awareness that “paintings talk slowly, so humor inevitably gets warped and transformed, often exposing underlying feelings.”


Although Cerletty approaches his images with a tongue-in-cheek humor, there is an underlying sincerity in his attention to detail. When he titles an oil on linen work depicting a freshly painted room

Quiet Grace

(2011) it elevates the mundane scene of drop cloths, a ladder, and paint color swatches to an unapparent seriousness, and his masterful application of light versus shadow and flat versus slick color give the scene the psychological resonance of the sublime.

Cerletty has had solo exhibitions at Blum and Poe in Los Angeles, Office Baroque in Brussels, Team Gallery in New York, and Rivington Arms in New York. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Studio Voltaire in London, Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art, State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and Museum Voor Moderne Kunst in Ostend, among other institutions.