The frenetically drawn portrait on the invitation to the opening of Ancient Awakening at the Raúl in Manhattan piqued my interest. Usually, I’m blinded by the flurry of gallery announcements, but this one somehow grabbed me by the eye.
Ancient Awakening features the work of “self-taught” artist Matthew Marcot, who specializes in Abstract and Neo-Expressionist approaches. During these stressful days at the brink of who-knows-what, I am drawn to words and images of upset and struggle, and particularly an underlying theme in Marcot’s painting: giving visual expression “to unseen ritualistic and cosmic forces”—benign and menacing—that define modern civilization. “This was a facility of ancient artforms based on superstition and religiosity, such as in African sculpture, religious manuscripts and cave drawings,” which Marcot says he invests in “contemporary life.”
Marcot’s embrace of primal expression includes his hieroglyphic-like calligraphy, biomorphic semiotics and austere geometric portraiture. Through these means “he brings the human being back to their roots.”
Interested what his artistic intentions are—to express himself or a larger zeitgeist—I engaged him in the following lively inquiry.
There is a volcanic quality to your paintings. What is erupting that causes this sensation?
The stimulus to begin working for me is friction. It’s a reverberating uneasiness, a kind of feral energy that I can never quench by any outer force. So there comes a moment where some primal force erupting inside of me needs to reproduce itself outward. That’s where the work starts.
Similar to Hilma af Klint, a spiritual medium artist (and perhaps the first recorded abstract artist), I feel that I am being used as a conduit, or a vehicle, for these primordial abstractions to take place. The sensation of friction is what impels me to begin working—but once I am in the midst of working I feel that I am being guided by an outer force to reproduce these expressions. I see that the “volcanic” energy of my work is a relationship between the subtle vitality of the force that is guiding me and the screaming passions of myself. Creating art is my singular addiction, because of what you explain as this erupting quality: It’s a state of unearthly enchantment, endless mystery and wonder.
In your work you use words, letters, numbers, scribbles—in other words, graphic design elements. Where does this influence come from?
Since I was very young I’ve had the oddest fascination with ancient art, or tribal art. Whenever I would travel infrequently to the Caribbean as a kid with my family, I would always bring back the masks from that region. By the time I finished high school I had a bedroom full of jarring tribal masks. In my early twenties, this fascination with geometric sculpture and tribal masks consumed me, and the deeper philosophy of certain methods of African sculpture began to organically become the overriding ritual of my art—which was the act of rendering spirits as a solid to become sovereign from them.
It has become apparent to me that the influence of these ancient artforms could not have possibly been born from my upbringing of Matthew Marcot, the white middle-class suburbanite from Long Island. If I found out I was a sculptor of deities for Hindu temples in India in a past life, it would explain the seeming discontinuity between me as Matthew Marcot here and now, and the source of the art that pours out of me. Of course, this is sheer speculation. Either way, I find my artistic expression to be a privilege, and thoroughly enjoy the mystery of it.
Tell me more about the spiritual sense that informs your imagery.
When I was 22 years old I moved into a Hindu Temple on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Having grown up since age 13 in the freneticism of New York City, I felt a deep yearning to take a step back and to develop an imperturbable peace that I could bring to whatever career path I chose. While living at the ashrama I became engrossed in the daily rituals, such as singing bhajan (sacred hymns), chanting on japa beads, as well as delving into ancient texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, wherein I developed an inexhaustible affinity for the intricacies of the Sanskrit language, both phonetically and artistically. This instilled in me an insatiable curiosity for ancient art forms, that would later transform into passions for Islamic manuscripts, Egyptian scrolls, cave drawings and African sculpture. My first introduction into Sanskrit I see now was the inflection point on my interest in crafting modern symbology and language systems that are in relationship with our ancient past.
The use of biomorphic shapes, semiotics and calligraphic elements in my work is approaching my work from the same ritualistic perspective as these ancient artforms—to approach my work from an ancient perspective using modern materials. I find it essential that in a human community that appears to be sacrificing its humanness in the hope of a digital salvation, that I bring my awareness to ancient ways of understanding the world around me—that feel more harmonious in my spirit than what’s being plated for me as a Gen Z’er. By rendering my own calligraphic system of language through my hieroglyphic-like script, while too birthing my own species of forms, I am essentially creating my own pictorial universe to endlessly explore in a world that I feel is being stripped of its underlying humanity … which I guess makes me a Gen Z dropout.
How do you think that being self-taught has molded your art making?
I’ve many friends who have been classically trained, from different angles of approaching art. And what I hear from them often is that it can sometimes be difficult to forget their technical skills and rawly express themselves without adulteration.
What I’ve found by being self-taught is that I have no art curricula baseline to return back to; I don’t have the burden of memory to bring in the reigns on my immediate expression. I am actually not very interested in art—however I am maniacally focused, and nothing short of possessed, to express and reproduce the avalanche of energy inside of me outward. That’s what I see as the advantage of being self-taught. I feel like endeavoring to make an art career out of being an autodidact is like jumping out of an airplane with no parachute, but there’s also no earth. It’s unbridled freedom.
I’ve always been curious how artists describe themselves. Neo-Expressionist comes to mind. What do you want, if anything, as a rubric?
I’m reminded of the Jackson Pollock quote, “Technique is just a means to making a statement.” For the viewer, having a historical label I think is useful for penetrating a work of art to contextualize it and thereby make it easier to communicate with it. Personally, I find labels or rubrics to be dysfunctional—even though I would be the first to say that my work does resemble Neo-Expressionism, and my purely calligraphic works could easily be placed under the umbrella of Abstract Expressionism, or Calligraphic Abstraction.
If I was given the full-ranged facility to categorize my work without placing it in a historical group, I would coin it Primordial Abstraction. My work is about opening myself to these universal forces and ancient ritualistic means of expressing myself, while operating in the arena of modern art. So to answer your question, working through my aversion of labels or rubrics, I would tentatively describe my work as Primordial Abstraction.
