The focus of Erik Mátrai’s Air exhibition is on the artist’s latest series of paintings. These large-scale abstract canvases are most akin to the homogeneous surface formations of “colour field” painting. However, instead of direct painting gestures, brushstrokes and scrapes, the surfaces of the paintings are filled with subtly overlapping, almost ethereal areas of colour through a special paint spraying technique.
In a process based on the artist’s own body and breath, tiny, almost invisible patches of paint are placed next to each other and overlap on the surface of the canvas. In other words, the fields of colour on the canvas are not actually created from physically mixed colours, but, in the sense of pointillist colour theory, are created purely and unmixed, from the optical constellation of tiny dots in the viewer’s eye. The resulting paintings open up vistas of fictional atmospheric phenomena and transcendental landscapes.
Mátrai’s atmospheric paintings, as well as his related works on paper, explore the sublime aesthetic that is central to his large-scale light art installations, and through them, in effect, the contemporary possibilities of the relationship between natural cognition and sacrality.