For many of today’s artists, me included, Mercedes Matter transformed our lives, through her passionate teaching and the NY Studio School that grew out of her vision. But she was more than a teacher. She was a dedicated artist, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists and one of the few women accepted into “The Club.” Educated by her father, Philadelphia artist and colorist Arthur B. Carles, and the European avant-garde, she knew she wanted to paint from age 6. Though she rarely exhibited, I suspect because she felt her paintings were never done, her show at Berry Campbell, up through Oct. 4, is a must-see show, as it is an exquisitely curated retrospective of her art, from 1932 when she was just 22 and already translating her observations into felt modern space and form, through 1992, just 9 years before her death. The informative catalog essay, written with acute visual sensitivity by Christina Kee, reveals an almost religious awakening Mercedes had while walking with Hans Hoffman. As he describes how the sky comes forward, pressing against the buildings and receding road, Mercedes suddenly discovers the power of “the picture plane,” and it is the tension of the picture plane, the profound experience of seeing 3-dimensions compressed into 2-dimensions, along with the interweaving rhythms of form and space, and the power of interval, that would occupy her in her art. Throughout her life, in the quest to find this complexity and perfection of pictorial relationships, Mercedes could sometimes find so many relations that a painting became overwhelmed by its density, but the work in this show breathes and expands, and though perhaps at times unfinished, is nevertheless in a compelling state of becoming. One of her latest paintings, made in 1992, is built-up and magical. Here her belief in the plasticity of relations and intense looking, her love of color and space as rhythm, her sense that art is the manifestation of the inner spirit all come together to make a transcendent experience. In this show we feel her belief that art is a miracle, and experience art made by an artist who was the real thing.

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