Lush Minimalism

I think your term, "lush minimalism", is very descriptive of and apt for your work. The grid is a fairly constant structure in your work, as you talk about in your interview with Julie, yet you do things by throwing the gird off-center, or not completing it, or using a fragment of a grid. And Julie, says, "And you obviously revel in color; no minimalist sensibility here."

Interestingly, Tyler Green wrote today about Anne Truitt. He mentions Judd's early 60's critique of Truitt's work, saying, "The work looks serious without being so," in particular referring to her color and the divisions on her boxes and planks, and yet there he was in the 80's using lush color, too, with colored Plexiglas.

Green also talks about where Truitt was from, in Eastern Maryland, and the low elevation and the flat, far distances one can see. Her work seems about place, color, light. My friend, George Lawson, said when Truitt died that she should have the same recognition that, for example, Agnes Martin has (and I add, perhaps she didn't because she raised a family, never lived in New York, and didn't have a mythology surrounding her art such as, for example, Martin's break from painting and living in the desert, or Judd's scale of activities as a critic, 101 Spring St., and Chinati in Marfa, TX).

These are all artists using the grid, or right angles, or box-like forms.

Your work seems to be working somewhere in this same territory as far as form and a kind of interiorization of place, but of course, it is way more lush. I also wonder whether the fact that you primarily paint on panels is a contributing factor, since it gives your work a more solid body than if it were on canvas, and so there is this feeling of solidity to the paint that is like a frozen liquid.

Jerry Cullum wrote in a review in Art in America, March 2000, "These pictures display formal rigor exquisitely combined with the imprecision inherent in Mattera's medium." You never have precise, hard edges- there is always a flow, the mark of the brush, depth, bits of crust or small pockmarks. Your work, like my HTML drawings, seems to be working against a kind of rigid, almost static geometry.

All of this above just a beginning way to poke at you- what is geometry in your work? How do you use it, and how not? Where does this "lush minimalism" come from, what experience, what place?