Daniel Mato | Behind the dunes: Solo exhibition

Morgan Lehman Gallery is pleased to present Daniel Mato’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Behind the dunes. Mato’s paintings defy belief. His freehand color shapes seep into the canvas like nebulous pools, yet their edges appear sharply precise. The surfaces––ranging from dark chromatic tones to highlights that glow like actual light––reveal their depth through transparent layers of pigment-rich paint.

Mato has “always thought that the subject of painting is the painting itself,” that his work is fundamentally about “how the paint is applied on the support.” This statement is consonant with the legacy of Mark Rothko; translated across the 20th century by Robert Ryman, and the Color Field movement. His studio practice, however, is energized by a long list of contemporaries and near contemporaries; including: Shirley

Jaffe, Mary Heilmann, Peter Joseph, Bernard Piffaretti, Kimber Smith, Claude Viallat, Marina Adams, Amy Sillman, and Howard Hogkins. Much as Mato, these artists navigate the border between painting’s many dichotomies. Expression and geometry, sensitivity and rigor, repetition and accident, humor and seriousness, simplicity and complexity, abstraction and figuration. 

Mato’s canvases bring us wholly present with their sensitivity to color, surface, and the human mark. His work holds a perfect edge, yet also undulates and curves, drawing us deep beneath the surface and

towards the furthest perception.

Daniel Mato is a French painter (b. 1983) who lives and works in Paris. He graduated from ENSAPC (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy) with the congratulations of the jury. He was the laureate in 2017 of the “Prix International de Peinture Novembre à Vitry”. In recent years he has presented solo exhibitions at the Galerie Philippe Valentin in Paris, at the Galerie Jean Collet in Vitry-sur-Seine, at Galerie d’art de Créteil. He has also participated in numerous collective exhibitions, at the Domaine Vranken-Pommery in Reims, at the Pavillon Carré de Baudoin in Paris, at Ample Espace d'Art contemporain in Amplepuis, at the ISBA in Besançon, at Néon in Lyon.