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.