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Nighttown BY AIDAN DUNNE 2008

Francis Matthews is clearly, to borrow a phrase from Tom Waits, a Nighthawk at the Diner. His paintings draw us into a nocturnal world, exploring the deserted streets and byways while the city sleeps. Silence hangs in the air. Pools of electric light, pale yellow or eerily coloured neon, spread out and fade into the enveloping darkness, and they are endlessly reflected in myriad surfaces, in rainwater slicks and chrome, gloss painted doors and window panes, parked cars and the calm surface of the Grand Canal. Shadows are deep and impenetrable. Light reflected and distorted takes on a life of its own, reinventing the ordinary and setting us momentarily adrift, struggling to find our bearings. This nighttime world in all its strangeness and familiarity is fixed with calm precision in the paintings. They are photographic in their optical qualities, but they also have the unmistakable slowness, the deliberation of paint. The artist has written about a pivotal realization he experienced during a visit to an exhibition featuring paintings by Vermeer and his contemporaries at the National Gallery of Ireland. Although he was interested in the endless proliferation of detail in the work of several Dutch painters, he realized that, in this way of working, the law of diminishing returns kicked in. The more detail they included, and the more the viewer focused on the detail, the less room there was for the painting as such. You couldn’t see the wood for the trees. To Matthews’ surprise, this didn’t happen in Vermeer’s work. Although he has an unparalleled reputation for the limpid clarity of his paintings, when you look at the pictures themselves Vermeer seems curiously disdainful of detail. How did he achieve this paradoxical combination of vagueness and precision? It has long been recognized that he was familiar with and made use of optical instruments. Which instruments exactly and how he used them remain the source of some debate, but there is no question but that the paintings reproduce lens-based effects. As David Hockney notes in Secret Knowledge, his book on the Old Masters’ use of optical aids, Vermeer’s paintings feature lens-like foreshortening, differential focus, with areas and objects in soft focus or out of focus altogether, and halation – the halo effect in which out of focus highlights spread out into the surrounding space. In his brilliant book Vermeer’s Camera, Philip Steadman goes further and argues, very clearly and convincingly, that the artist used an elaborate camera obscura (a kind of filmless camera widely employed by artists) carefully set up in a studio space that features in most of his paintings. In a sense Vermeer painted as though he were a camera. He implies detail but on closer inspection that detail turns out to be an illusion. Matthews was struck by this, by the way fragments of Vermeer’s paintings become abstract patterns that only assume representational coherence in the context of the whole. Lawrence Gowing has written of Vermeer’s “vocabulary of light”, and there is a profound sense in which his paintings are made from the palpable fall of light on spaces and objects so that, as Matthews remarks of his own work, “brightness fleetingly becomes a solid thing.” More, captured through a lens, light emanating from a source and flowing through the labyrinth of the night-time city somehow defines what we cannot see. What would otherwise be nothingness is filled in with the mass and contours of buildings and objects. All of which is of course implied rather than depicted as such. But we recognise it because we know how to read it, just as we know how to read the picture of reality that Vermeer paints, even though it is in many ways an abstraction. To a striking degree, Matthews’ paintings are about what cannot be seen. Several commentators have suggested that this is true of a great deal of painting, and of the visual arts in general. In a way this flies in the face of common sense, given that so much visual art seems to show us how to see. Yet when Jacques Lacan says that the image in a painting is in a sense a decoy, a screen for what lies behind the painting; when the artist Frank Stella writes that the painter is always interested in something that is just out of sight, beyond the edge of the composition; when Michelangelo Antonioni the film director says that what is interesting about an image is always what lies behind it, or Victor Burgin says that paintings are fundamentally about what cannot be visualised, they strike a chord. If we set aside our natural prejudices for a moment, we can see, so to speak, what they are getting at. We glimpse the notion of painting as an attempt to depict what cannot be depicted. Lest that sound perverse, it is a proposition entirely consistent with Samuel Beckett’s description of writing as an activity in extremis, pushing beyond the bounds of articulacy. Why say what can easily be said, Beckett implies. Equally, when he wrote about visual art, which he did for some time, he posed a comparable question. Why proceed along a well-tried representational road, marking out the world with the eyes of a building contractor? So Matthews sets out to describe an invisible realm, or at any rate a night-time world that exists at the fringes of visibility, that calls upon our imagination, inviting us to fill in the gaps, make guesses, use our instincts to judge if this laneway is safe or whether danger might lurk around the corner, whether that shadow marks a solid wall or an empty space. If a doorway is illuminated when everything else is extinguished and asleep, as in Victoria Street, surely we can take that as a signal. Perhaps it’s our late-night destination, the refuge or recourse that tempts us to explore yet another hour beyond midnight. Certain consistencies become apparent in the topography of the paintings. There are areas that are closed off to us, but also avenues of exploration, multiple points of entrance and exit that indicate a world beyond the pictorial space. One of the most striking is the ladder that rises from the Trinity Squash Court, ascending towards a pool of brightness above. A source of light often lurks around a corner or beyond the edges of the frame, inviting us to follow its lead. In Off Camden Street an alleyway recalls the configuration of Vermeer’s The Little Street, with wheeled bins as a contemporary counterpart to the chores in progress in the Vermeer. Beneath Clanbrassil Street, equally, echoes the celebrated View of Delft. That painting, and The Little Street are exceptional in that, as Steadman points out, Vermeer increasingly confined himself to the interior world of the studio. It’s noticeable that Matthews does not include people in his paintings, even though he focuses on a densely populated urban environment, a slice of Dublin as precisely recreated and identified as Joyce’s is in Ulysses. In this he differs from an artist whose work forms an obvious point of reference, Edward Hopper. While Hopper often depicted empty urban and domestic scenes that, like Matthews’, seem to be haunted by the recent or hidden presence of people, he is best known for putting isolated, reflective figures in such settings, Nighthawks being a prime example. His feeling for architectural space, carefully observed, is extraordinary, and Matthews is clearly as ambitious in his attempts to describe not just the physical qualities of the city but its exact emotional flavour. This exhibition marks a significant step forward in terms of both his technical proficiency and the scope of his thematic concerns. Aidan Dunne