Matthias Alfen — Disturbed Surfaces: Mirroring Depths

By Patrick McCord, PhD

We must live in the present, but the present is always pinched between two potent mental constructs: the past and the future. Our memories are our reference to the past and our imaginations are how we conjure the future. Memory and imagination: both essentially inaccurate, both illusions concocted by what we want to believe. Both distractions from breathing in the moment.

— Ibrahim Sarfraz

Overview:

Matthias Alfen’s work often plays with the human understanding of time as space. The time of our life—is like the space of a path, each moment a step... the entire life: a journey. We use many of the same words to show position as both spacial and temporal. In the time/space of our imaginations, the past is behind us; it is filled with memories; the present is a good spot to be in, and arena for choices, a vantage point to look back and foreward; the future waits in front of us, a positive potential, an expanse of possibility. And yet, time is not like concrete space. While you may know a space, like your house or a soccer field, because you can move confidently through it, the only evidence we have of either past events or future potentials, are constructs in the now, our active perception of the present. Time is not space but imagination. And anything—like a sculpture or a painting—in our present experience that seems strange, distorted, unusual, or arresting is telling us something about our memories, our preconceptions, and our expectations.

Sculpture:

Matthias Alfen mixes his deep understanding of human anatomy and kinesiology with a surrealist’s taste for contradiction and overstatement in witty figures designed to both confuse and compel. Alfen’s surrealism, like Giacometti’s, is based in the human shape, but Alfen manipulates scale and form to create shapes in space of disconcerting, sometimes primitive, power.

All Alfen’s nude figures are, to some degree, accurate depictions of the human form, yet he likes to exaggerate volumes: they are too wide, too long, or sometimes he uses a gigantic scale—but as he exaggerates with proportion, Alfen then subtracts from a complete or consistent body image.

Some of his work focuses only on a single body part or area, cutting away the rest of the form. The single hand or head or even a pair of feet, in clear lines but expanded scale, tease the viewer to imagine the rest of the missing body: a huge person, not quite of the real world, but a lyric and sensitive whole being.

Sometimes Alfen, in the manner of the Cubists, incorporates an impossible dimension into the shape. One figure has a face and from that angle, the form suggests a whole body, yet as the viewer moves to a different angle, she discovers that what appeared to be the back or the side the figure’s head, is a different face, another mood or moment, hidden behind the pose of first impression; we are looking at two moments in the same person. What emotion is it that connects them?

Sometimes Alfen perfectly inverts a body part so what should be a convex bulge of muscle is a concavity in the exact shape of that same muscle—the negative a perfect rendition of the expected positive; other times, he will build an articulated figure in action around an emptiness; instead of solid center core, absence. A walking figure observed from the front is missing toes, but seen from the side has the toes on the back of the foot, as if walking simultaneously both forward and backward, and this then forces us to think about the other absent presences suggested by the curves of the form.

It is in these formal additions and subtractions, in the puzzle of absent presences, that the eye is lured to look more closely. And with the eye, comes the viewer’s own proprioception and imagination.

When looking at a human form, whether at a whole body or a part, the viewer’s own physique is sympathetically stimulated—we feel bodily images in our own bodies as well as seeing them “over there.” The more we look, the more intensely we feel the proprioception of our own bodies. Alfen’s exaggerations overload our inner imaginary selves, while his subtractions and inversions deny the requisite solidity that we take for granted: viewing his work creates a minor crisis of seeing and self. Like Giacometti or Francis Bacon, Alfen’s ability to extrude, isolate or distort the human form in a dream-like way both puzzles and arrests us; his forms create a hallucinatory reference, a strangely exciting perturbation of what our own presence (or absence) might mean.

Shining Surfaces/Glowing Depths

The young Picasso never wasted a canvas. If he couldn’t sell a painting, he painted another on top of it. Sometimes he would even incorporate a few of the submerged lines from the first painting into his current creation. Like Picasso, Matthias Alfen has painted the Shining Surfaces/Glowing Depths series atop earlier canvases, but going beyond the young Spaniard’s pragmatic economies, Alfen is attempting a meditation on the nature of what is past and how the past creates the past and even implies the future. According to Alfen, the painted canvas can be “the membrane between past and future. The canvas holds an image—an active perceptual present-tense for both painter and viewer—through which the past flows toward the future; it is an emphatic experience of now.”

When he conceived of this series of canvases, Matthias Alfen knew he wanted to work in a metallic colors, polished and tarnished silvers, platinum, iron, steel, and the occasional glow of gold beneath the surface. These are the colors and patina of 21st Century industrialization, urbanization, and the human presence of shiny machines and buildings... But Alfen began by taking his own canvases from a period when he was working with lushly colored abstract-impressionist landscapes, and like the frugal Picasso, Alfen began painting on top of them from the contrasting metallic pallette. Going beyond Picasso’s minor echoing of his old works, Alfen studied the originals for their structural lines and organization, using those details as the basis for each new canvas’s flowing abstractions. While the dominant metal colors make for a modern, even machine-like surface, the variety, flow, and the interlocking nature of his shapes gives the designs a subtle organic feel. The Gestalt, or whole impression of each one is an intricate interweave of energetic forces, suggesting mazes, sometimes maps or jigsaw puzzles, or perhaps the intertwining of an underground root system. Also unlike Picasso, Alfen doesn’t simply allude to his earlier original, he allows actual sections of that colorful past work to show through unpainted “windows” in the silvery surface. A more Romantic past shows through, but only glimpsed as it must be integrated in a fresh design conception.

Yet, when he began silvering over the first few colored canvases, Alfen felt some confliction: on the one hand, he was vandalizing his previous work, not unlike the haters who spray paint or slash Old Masters. Every painted canvas he was defacing could be potentially valuable at some future point as an authentic artifact of a past theme. Today, Picasso’s paint-overs are X-rayed so that the lost genius of the earlier canvas can be recovered. But Alfen was impatient with this kind of thinking which sentimentalizes memory and makes a fetish of “potential” value.

So he decided to “vandalize” his own work in still another way, by slashing holes. But instead of slashes that would destroy the surface integrity of the canvas, Alfen saw an opportunity to give the work an added dimension. Cutting actual holes in the canvas in similar shapes to the “windows to the past” he had already left unpainted, he then backed these new openings like actual windows, using either transparent Lucite or a mirror surface, adding two new dimensions to the work.

The clear windows invite the viewer to look through the painted surface to see what is actually behind it; but in doing so, this window destroys the pretense that the framed painting is an abundant, holistic, and sufficient experience. Looking through to what is behind—the wall, a shadow, perhaps another image planted there as a comment—reminds us that as complete and whole we believe ourselves to be on our own present-tense experience, we must be aware of the unseen dimension of the past “behind” us, supporting our current being

The mirror surfaces offer two more conundrums for the viewer, depending on the angle. Looking from the side, the mirror in the canvas will offer reflections of the area behind the viewer, yet in front of the painting—the room, people, light, the opposite wall or ceiling—as if inviting the viewer to spontaneously incorporate the reflected images into the greater design—it’s what the human mind wants to do, to make wholes out of parts, but it’s a dynamic dimension of potential meaning we don’t associate with a static, “finished” painting.

And then, walking over to look straight on into the mirror, the viewer must see herself in the painting. A witty reminder that each viewer only sees through the lens of her own experience. Although the painting may appear to give the same perceptual potential to everyone, each of us has a unique impression. We are constructing the meaning of the canvass as we construct all meanings, through our personal understanding, the memories and training of our individual perceptions and thoughts.