Luxury, fervour and simplicity – such are the words which spring to mind when the visitor penetrates into the chapel at Tünsdorf in the Schengen region. One arrives having passed along the streets of a village in which one has already seen the mark of Matt Lamb, visible even in the ornamentation of some of the houses, a village where an important part of his oeuvre is guarded, albeit somewhat liberally, like a treasure generously accessible to all. It is cold outside and one has need of a piece of the cloak of St Martin. The temperature sinks a few more degrees as one enters the chapel, this grotto of stone. But a strange warmth fills the visitor, and it is this new warmth that I would seek to define.

            Those three words which I placed at the start of my text might constitute an involuntary response from the great American artist and a somewhat more voluntary response from his admirers to the celebrated triad of Baudelaire who, though he was of the Catholic religion, was by no means seeking to define the mystery of the Trinity: ‘Luxe, calme et volupté’ – luxury, peace and pleasure. But there is no pleasure, no impure voluptuousness here, and the peace is not simply that of a chapel being visited outside the tourist season, when visitors crowd into the Schengen region. The first word, the only one common to both groups, is that which first forces itself upon us, but for very different reasons. In both places the luxury is that of gold: in Baudelaire’s poem entitled ‘Invitation to a Voyage’, inspired by the North and by Holland in particular, the setting suns ‘dress the fields / The canal, the town itself / In hyacinth and gold’; everything is filled ‘with a warm light’ ; in the chapel at Tünsdorf the persistent gold is mixed with the white of purity and the green of hope, evoking rather the rising sun, an Orient of faith.

            It would be incorrect to speak of ‘decoration’, even if we think of the apparent sobriety of a Chinese or Japanese lacquer. Everything in the art of Matt Lamb has the aura of spirituality and his colours are mystical colours. Here the radiance comes from irradiation of the Spirit. Contrasting with the precise form of religious objects we see there at the front – the slender wax-tapers, the square cross crowning the tabernacle and ornamenting the group of the Virgin and Child – and setting them off all the more, is not the formlessness of a cloud but a diffusion of colours in a profusion of light. The gold is not reduced to spangles or to a few touches; it spreads, with a generosity of inspiration and talent.

            If we speak of the dome it is not sky blue, even if it represents – symbolically – the  sky. It allows us to admirably comprehend the spiritual value of the last verse in Rimbaud’s ‘Vowels’, a sonnet often interpreted in too reductive a manner, as if it were but a coloured alphabet, here interpreted as a tentative palette: 

                        ‘Oh the Omega, the violet radiance of His Eyes.’

            For Matt Lamb’s blue is very much like violet. It is penetrated by the light of the sun and filled with divine depth. It is, to put it correctly, a theological blue. In the Apocalypse of St John the Divine God himself is defined as ‘the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending’. To no one more than he is the last colour in the rainbow, violet blue, so well suited. Nothing could better suggest the idea of Peace, an idea with which the little town of Schengen, and the whole region, including the village of Tünsdorf, are associated. The chapel, consecrated in 1954, served as a reminder of the need for peace ten years after the end of the Second World War even as the great hope of a united Europe was being born.

            One will not be surprised by the combinations so knowledgeably made by Matt Lamb. They do not derive from any Hexenküche.  These mixed colours, which might seem crude on the walls of a chapel, are always knowingly symbolic and are born of a profound artistic necessity. In accordance with Mallarmé’s vow, which Matt Lamb has made his own, they are seized at the source. One’s eyes also discover a mixture of inscriptions, of words or signs, at the heart of which radiates the word ‘Peace’, framed by the artist himself, for just as that ideal is necessary to the world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, so it is an essential part of the message communicated by Matt Lamb, this champion of Peace who would most assuredly merit the award of the Nobel Peace Prize.

            Neither religion nor humanitarian hope can be content with faded colours and mere tepidity is utterly alien to a personality as rich and as intense as Matt Lamb. His work as a whole, like this chapel decorated, or rather illustrated, by him, demonstrates that with an obstinate force, a force which is that of hope and which is visible even on the face of the great artist when one recognises it on the panels and frescoes there.

            The religious fervour of a believer can be satisfied with simple white crosses on a grisaille ground. But it also stirs up a furnace of more vivid colours. In the cavernous chapel at Tünsdorf these are reunited in a sort of bundle, opening up at the same time an avenue that leads to the holy figure of the Virgin. This is not merely an alcove of peace and faith; like Michelangelo in the Sixtine Chapel, Matt Lamb opens up unforeseen spaces, suggests mystical outpourings, sets off buffets of happiness and, beyond artistic happiness, of mystical joy.

            At times, a truly dramatic movement animates the fresco. It tends also to become like the stage in a holy theatre where the responses in a hieratic dialogue are exchanged in silence by dumb figures. At times, one even sees the artist’s own silhouette emerging in profile. This is not only an internal signature, a kind of stamp, but his own participation, as a pilgrim of a work of humanity and faith. We no longer fully comprehend the force that lay behind the biblical expression which Jules Romains chose in the first half of the 20th century as the title for his great cycle Les Hommes de bonne volonté [Men of Good Will] – a cycle which was, nonetheless, absolutely secular in inspiration. But Matt Lamb simply wished to be one of them. Humble and yet superior all at once.

            An isolated figure, almost insistent, holds our attention. One might take it at first glance for a mystical Pierrot. It is a sculpture by Matt Lamb. I think I can pick out here a new figure for the artist, one of naked solitude, of a battle that recalls spiritual combat, that innocence which is indubitably the best weapon in any such combat. But it is also a Christ-like figure, without the shadow of overflow from one to the other. Which is why such a weapon may well be said to be ‘miraculous’, like the miraculous draught of fishes in the Gospel According to St Luke :

‘… he said unto Simon, Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.

And Simon answering said unto him, Master, we have toiled all the night, a have taken nothing: nevertheless at they word I will let down the net.

And when they had this done, they inclosed a great multitude of fishes: and their net brake.’ (John v : 4-6).

            Christ is there, in the chapel at Tünsdorf, in the depth of this quest, of this catch which – we know from the passage in the Gospels – is a catch of words more than a catch of fish. The imagery, as represented by Matt Lamb, does not deceive us. It is neither that of a naive image-maker nor the production of Art Brut. It clearly and subtly lies within the competence of symbolic imagination. The spirit of the Gospels bathes both the living fresco and the dead Christ, the Crucified man whose bloody hands bear the stigmata of the Passion. For mankind, this is a new source of life, willed by God, who has sacrificed his own son for them.

            I will gladly say of Matt Lamb that represents a first approach, as yet only briefly outlined, to something like a Middle Ages of our time. In that, he is unique. The space of the chapel at Tünsdorf, its unusual illumination, confirm such an impression. A surprisingly luminous window, almost too bright, opens up in the shadows, illuminating a bare table, some unknown credence in the empty room, as in Mallarmé’s celebrated sonnet. This light also activates the branches and the flowers, the figures dominated by the image of Christ transfigured. As this narrow window opens up we have the sudden impression that everything is swinging, that all trace of shadows soften and disappear, chased away at the same time as the insinuations of an evil spirit. The chapel also benefits, we must admit, from the lustre shed by the roof, from the support provided to natural light by artificial light.

            One is tempted to ask of oneself: what are these garishly-coloured umbrellas – which are, we know, one of Matt Lamb’s favourite motifs – doing here? For me, their first virtue is to dispel the black of what is usually called ‘the curé’s umbrella’, to give it back its colours or rather to give it the colours of the Heavenly City. A chronochromy, like that of which Olivier Messiaen dreamed in music. There is the plain umbrella, that of the shepherd of Francis Jammes, leading his flock of dirty sheep along the muddy tracks of the Basque country. And then there are the marvellous umbrellas of Matt Lamb, which are promises of an alliance like – according to the tale told in Genesis – the rainbow, the seal of God announcing the reconciliation after the trial that was the Flood.

            I spoke of the Middle Ages, but this too leads to a renaissance of painting and sculpture after so much gratuitous sophistication in the so-called modern schools, after so many Byzantine and Neo-Byzantine efforts. For Matt Lamb is an artist of affirmation and it is that which immediately seizes the visitor to the chapel in Tünsdorf. His art, here as elsewhere, responds to a vocation, to an authentic call.

            At Tünsdorf, the stained glass of the cupola signifies ‘elevation’, the window ‘transparency’. The sacred objects are in tune with the liturgical reminiscences of the paintings. The sculptures inhabit a space that seems as though it should be confined and yet expands to a totally different dimension. A magnificence unfolds which does not exclude the refuge of more familiar objects. Some of the expressions employed here, if simplified, hark back to those of Mallarmé in a text from his Divagations entitled ‘Worship’. For Matt Lamb, by all other means, has come, according to the poet’s vow, to ‘lean the Dream on the altar opposite the rediscovered tomb’, to ‘intone the ritual’ but in visual means, and to ‘betray with a gleam the sunrise of the celebrant’s burden’.

Without doubt, as the saying goes, all that glisters is not gold. But gold, in the painting of Matt Lamb, is in the service of an éclat of transcendence. It allows us to forget vagueness, mediocrity and greyness, and to give ourselves up fully to Truth and Beauty.