matt volpe

Matt Volpe is a full-time painter in South Philadelphia’s Italian Market neighborhood. A ‘round the clock’, prolific-type painter. A painter from head to sole, compelled to be an instrument for his work. The kind of work you’ll see in a thickly bound coffee table book in the next decade. So get close while you can.

Step in and saddle up. It’s Basquiat-meets-comic-book-stares-in-a-swirl-of-urban-drama—topped with a pinch of pathos. Take a sip, then take another. Volpe’s secret recipe will not be replicated.

Breaking apart each ingredient; high impasto layers offer stoke after stroke of sardonic commentary. Drink up. We’re trapped in the gaze, invited into a web of lustfully rich imagery held together by mixed type and pointed text. Each line scrawled and word underscores each individual character, they claw like refugees to the paint surface and toward the crowded borders. This density adds a precise and deliberate tension, holding each piece together. Like a baby swaddled, drunk from a womb-life of primordial dreaming. Or the man in the café, sipping Absinthe late into the night.

Come back for a visit anytime. The speakeasy is a place to hang your hat for a while.

Just make damn sure you can cover your tab.

artwork by christine jones

you may have permission to view. but you will get no apologies. opinions are welcome at your bequest. but most importantly, this is not about you

or is it?

here, the art object is in fact, the subject. a warm body chills when confronting this tricky, unconscious dynamic. the viewer becomes the viewed, frank and simple. but don’t worry, you're not being judged. its not about that either. 

looking closer, the relationship deepens. here we untangle layers of painterly study, pure craft, fine artisanship. the work employs years of influences; basquiat, freud, schiele, klimt, holzer. rich colors, experimental contrasts, bold communiques and, of course, the existential ‘other’. it is direct and confrontational, yet not intimidating. almost tender and intimate, even in its directness. even while images overlap and themes entwine, these paintings do not mince words.

passages are what they may be, a finished conversation; a thought to the self; a string of emotions—the germination of these to which we were not privy. as thoughts round out, the work completes. but what meaning do we assign when it provokes a reaction? who feels? us, the artist, or maybe the work?

despite obvious provocations, each piece is intended to be a contained unit. a kind of existential measure of the world's outside influence against the one within. and so what we encounter could easily be in fact, the ruler of the mind. our unconscious barometer. 

bitch, holla! is very serious, but also careful to not take itself too seriously. 

emily erb

you are invited into to an intimate world where encounters become expressions, process describes meaning and connectedness is everywhere.

welcome to the work of emily erb, painted during her travels to the island nation of madagascar, off the southeastern coast of africa. the images you see here were conjured as she explored and absorbed the local energy.

erb's work became a communication tool, both to the world around and from within. drawing from her fine arts training at temple university's tyler school of art, these deeply personal pieces are the outgrowth of her tapestry of experience. home in philadelphia, erb continues her own work and also is an assistant to odili donald odita. together they are preparing for the odita's exhibition at venice biennale, 2007.

in looking, there's a subtlety--a quietness. at once, her pieces become a vortex for sound and color, atmosphere and motion. but then, before our eyes, it emerges. color, space and sound, all vibrating, rhythmically building and assembling anew, as the artist--not necessarily nature--intended.

it's a world of spatial opposites, where line comes last, finding it's way ominously from the background to the fore, through layers of paint and memory.

erb's surfaces are places where color beguiles and textural layers form the corporeal from canvas. it is as if her subjects--unconscious of our presence--would suddenly turn, to find us all here, looking.

and so they look back, at once inviting and arresting us in their gaze.