Matt Lamb’s creative scope

Goethe used to say that mental processes and real processes coincide even if their courses are always parallel to each other. Reflection starts from the senses. Sacred writings tell us so, and so reveals the science created by the Greek. If mental processes arise out of the simplest daily events, then, as we have mentioned, Goethe believed that what really exists is what is in our mind.

Matt Lamb’s biographical profile in relation to his art, that I am going to describe next, can’t certainly be based on my personal direct experience. I know about this contemporary artist from what I have been told by a friend in common, the Spanish Martí Rom. I know about Matt Lamb from his works on books and catalogues that have been published, and which I have had the opportunity to read. I also know  about him from what I have read about his succinct biography: born in Chicago, Illinois, USA, in 1932, and from what some critics have written about his works of art’s aim. I also know about the affection this American artist feels for Picasso and Miró from our friend Martí Rom. Lamb considers them parallel artists, even taking into account all historical, human and social differences, to the idea he has of his own work, and in many occasions he seems to coincide with their work as far as forms are concerned.

This is all I have before I start to reflect on Lamb’s work. I think that what I am going to write will coincide with what the aim and practice of our artist’s painting really is, though it is certain that what I am going to describe will always correspond to what I have perceived, from my perspective, from my mental reality, which I hope will coincide with the reality of the motivation of this artist’s work.

By observing his work since 1980, I suddenly realize that his painting shares the formal scheme that features Paul Klee’s painting. Later, I come to know that Lamb did not start painting until he was around forty, and that he had been motivated by a strong inner need that led him to do so, and in a way that caused him to give up all other activities in order to devote all his energy to painting. This activity became more and more frenetic, to such an extent that the artist himself has said he has much more painting to do than time, with its threatening silence and scarce elasticity, may actually allow him to.

This apparent similarity with Klee comes from the fact that the Swiss-German artist, in order to recover his creative ingenuousness, had to unlearn as a painter all he had been taught to become a right artist in accordance with Renaissance standards from which the Western culture has developed, and this Western culture is the same in which Lamb interacts. So could Klee start from an internal spontaneity, like children’s spontaneity and from the experience of what has been unlearned.  Let’s go a little further: He could express himself in painting without the influences of an eye that has been educated by the mind, which could not be done by other contemporary expressionists of the Die Brücke or the Der Blaue Reiter, since they painted out of anger, hatred or love, while Klee painted from he feels deep inside, without any affection, as the philosopher Husserl claimed in his phenomenological studies necessary to achieve a clean knowledge with no historical burdens.

But Lamb did not begin in this state of sensitive and mental purging like Klee, but he was initiated in the art of painting from his inner need to express what he felt and he did so with no previous instruction that might influence his painting. Thus, what he had perhaps in common with Klee was his beginnings and the Swiss-German artist’s idea which is reflected in some of Lamb’s catalogues: an artist should be a poet, an explorer and a philosopher at the same time. The American artist, with his life experience, already bore in his sensitivity and in his mind those beliefs as to existence and felt the need to express them through color, which gives to his painting an expression of innocence, of rusticity and simplicity in his way of painting. He paints this way because he doesn’t have the problems of the artist who has received a formal instruction, who has a sensitivity that is limited by the classical concept of “mimesis”, which tells the artist to represent things as they are seen, because that is how they were created, and that these forms, as they are reflected in the mirror, are the ones among which we exist. Lamb does not live, nor does he paint with this prejudice; in his opinion what comes from his impulse, what he paints is the real thing, the things with which we interact, what he shows in his work. His image of reality is what is expressed on his work.

To this, my interpretation of Lamb’s work, I must add another artist’s predecessor who will justify what I say: William Blake. This English artist had his life divided in two halves: in one of them he was a well-known very skillful carver; in the other one, he had his own life, his philosophy in relation to the world, the one he experienced, the one he interpreted from his own experience. That same life he reflected in his personal work. Not only did he draw, but he was also capable of translating his experience into words, which were joined by his drawings. The shapes of his characters, angels, cherubs, thrones, only barely refer to the traditional shapes attributed to these entelechies. It was understandable, since as any good artist Blake wished to be understood, and with this aim, without surrendering himself to the ways and ideas of others – whose formality would be an obstacle to the possibility of understanding the world he wanted to show – he offered that reality of his with certain references to what was known but with sufficient identity so as to see that Blake’s creation referred to a personal world, supernatural to others, but absolutely real for his thinking and his experience. I think that Lamb’s work can be placed, with its own character and personality, within that representation developed by Blake who, on the other hand, was convinced that reality was not what others understood as such, the common reality, the one we find evident and certain, since we interact with it every day, but the one he conveyed on his paintings and works and described with poetry in his texts.

Let’s go a little further in order to define Lamb’s work better: his interest, as we have mentioned before, in Picasso and Miró. Precisely these two great artists, unlike Klee’s manner but with a similar intention and philosophy as to the way of thinking the world and living in it, created also a representation system that only follows their code, in their personal and unique way of communicating. Picasso makes use of a code or manner of expression that becomes his own language, even though its origin, that of cubism, was at the beginning an intellectual and esthetical operation aimed at ending with the false and deceptive reproduction of the Renaissance standards of perception. Picasso’s language does not necessarily have to become a message on what social forms of knowledge are like, but only show his sensitivity and thinking before the problems that affect both him and humanity. And the same applies to Miró, who from the very beginning felt uncomfortable when having to submit, in order to represent what his sensitivity experienced and what his mind elaborated, to the rules as established by an educational system which started to decay everywhere, as the knowledge of both social and human reality.

Lamb felt those great artists as his predecessors, as models to guide his personality and make real his world of painting; a world that necessarily is to be  different from that of these artists since their mental, historical and sentimental realities are not the same, but whose example – that of their freedom of creativity gives authority and justification to his personal manner of formally developing his sensitive world, and this is the way Lamb expresses his experiences based on what he thinks reality is.

I should also say, however, that there is a difference between Lamb and Miró´s work of art: Miró is based on a surrealistic process – that released him from Klee´s regression method – allowing and facilitating a direct expression of the images that may arise from the unconsciousness or that may be provided by onirism. On the other hand, I consider that Lamb´s work has never been based on these consciousness sub-worlds as he is motivated by a personal spiritual need which does not arise from psychological repression to society’s rules, but on his idea of being a part of this world and the mission that concerns to each human being individually, being his own mission the presentation of images – born from evocation, as those produced by words – that help us understand the transcendence of the meaning of life. Picasso’s work of art does not show any surrealism because his “imagery” – the perceptive forms transmitted by his plastic images – is rooted in his feelings and, occasionally, in his commitment to the social and political context he lives in.

As already mentioned by his analysts, Lamb has been influenced by Rouault´s work, sharing some formal similarities and religion-related concerns though it is evident, even in this text, that religion is lived quiet in a different manner by both artists as demonstrated by their experiences and the reflections resulting from such experiences.

Even though Lamb’s art is rooted in predecessors sharing the same vision of the cosmos he expresses in his work – a human vision of the religion preached by Jesus Christ – he has never resorted to established social patterns to promote his work. Lamb has created his own “iconography” on the basis of and as a consequence of the concept of plastic creativity elaborated during the forties and fifties in the United States of America, a means or procedure known as abstract expressionism that values the creative gestures transformed into absolute matter. But, even though Lamb has adopted this procedure, which afterwards was subjected to his consciousness expression needs, thus transforming such free matter into symbols with imprecise, unmistakable codes and, at the same time, reflecting the expressions and pains of the spirit. The matter, the colour with all its presence and power, the feature, the gesture, they are all present in Lamb’s work of art, but they are not expressed as an indefinite enthusiasm, like Pollock’s art, but something that is there, captured and with a meaning, as a consequence of a spiritual momentum motivating such gesture that is then translated into colours that do appear and are present or diluted in accordance with the acquiescence of the spirit governing the hands of the artist. According to Lamb’s words: a painting is never completed, it is finished only when somebody causes to separate the work of art from any possible intervention by its author. Evidently, this is the opposite to the classical work of art whose purpose is well defined: to be consistent with the model that created it, this is not possible in the art of Lamb as the spiritual status that generates and motivates everything is never at the point of satiety and saturation, a typical characteristic of the classical questioning of existence, where everything is precise, concrete and delimited: Plato’s idea.

Marti Rom´s Sculptures.

Sculpturing is something that first comes to existence in sensitivity: privilege can be given to the visual aspect but there are people who associate what they see with what they can touch. Others will be attracted by colours, thus satisfying their spirits through this impression while others will prefer these aspects to be concealed in something solid, this being the typical sensitivity of a sculptor. For those meticulously interested in words, it should be added that, as sculptures had no colours in the Renaissance period, what we have previously said about chromatism can be applied to the drawing, to the line: the object is present where the delineation is present. Some sensitive spirits need this precision while others are satisfied with the simple presence of the colour, the spot.

Martí Rom, born in Barcelona in 1955, born sculptor as he can see art in everything he observes, he can perceive the object in three dimensions. But he is a sculptor opposed to Michelangelo´s preach, he does not perceive the concrete form in the amorphousness as he accepts the form exactly as it is shown. Anything existing in space is already a sculpture, or, an element of sculpture. For this reason, most of his work is the result of the assemblage of different objects and forms.

But there is one more aspect to be taken into account in relation to painting: it must and can be seen from every angle, all vision angles are adequate, each part or aspect of a sculpture should always offer the best angle of vision of the sculpture because all views are correct, as practiced and demonstrated by Rodin. Marti Rodin realized that objects shaped over the time, those that nature and life have moulded day after day, precisely those objects can be viewed from everywhere, they show their best image from every angle. What can be seen? First, the fragment, its formal qualities, that are curiously always right and, second, the view of the whole, the assemblage which allows the observer to capture what his sensitivity or perceptive needs wish or feel like seeing or appreciating.

This discourse may seem in vain but this is not so because Martí Rom´s sculptures – as if he had learned, because of his selective affinities, from Joan Miró´s practice of creativity in the natural and social reality of Mont-roig – the assembled forms created by the hands of the sculptor do not admit any perception other than that providing satisfaction to the tact and eyes, because they lack the so called rational perception order that settled societies impose as the only feasible order. For those sculptures, the classical notions of order and proportion which establish the coordinates to initiate any comprehension process are not valid because the assemblage has been performed according to taste, whim and through a random process whose result pleases only the organizer of said assemblage. Do not approach these sculptures pre-judging what they refer to but, instead, the sensitive approach should be initiated based on what this plastic assemblage transmits. This is the reason why these sculptures satisfy the aesthetic demands of the free souls, not the demands of those souls in search of what they want to find but of those which are ready for adventure and open to anything that they may encounter. As previously stated, this encounter will be consistent with wishes. Like children’s games, that do not require that things are formal and corresponding to what they have been designated, word does not imply image, it is our wishes that tell us what we have in front of us.

Consequently, Martí Rom´s work of art always offers the surprise that nothing is what we have been told it would be but what we wished it would be. At every moment, in every sequence of life, behaviour depends on the circumstances. Creators know that this is one of the few existing truths: that our life and everything we do from it is constantly changing motives, proximity and intention, therefore, our environment is always new for us and it always demands invention and creativity of new relations. These are the characteristics of Martí Rom´s sculptures.

An encounter on the journey: Matt Lamb and Martí Rom.

In the text above, we have stated the reasons that we could call the seeds, genesis, roots of Matt Lamb and Martí Rom´s works of art, but not their rational motives. Because the former come from the inside of the individual, from his feelings and sensations, but do not come from the outside world, as the latter do, in order to establish grades and categories of order of sensitivity and wishes.

Attracted by the transcendental echoes of Picasso, one day this painter from Chicago arrives in Horta de Sant Joan – the place where Picasso learned, according to his own words, everything he knew about life – and there, on that very same land and special places, he decided to set up his work of arts. Shortly after, the American painter, attracted by another echo, exhibited his work where Joan Miró, another artist he also admired, used to go to satiate his senses and nourish his sensitivity, Mont-roig. This circumstance helps to establish a contact between the American painter Lamb and the Catalan sculptor Martí Rom, both attracted by the magnetic forces of Miró; who comes from a land and a reality which boosts creativity from intimacy, from wishes, from where it is possible to understand art as poetry. The relationship developed since then and the indirect affinities derived from said friendship motivated the need and wish of collaboration with each other based on their specific creative skills.

Lamb had tried to approach the sculpturing art. At the same time, Martí Rom occasionally gave color to his assemblages. Both artists were looking for a projected complement to their creative actions.

As a result, Martí Rom poses his sculptures on the basis of his own postulates and elaborates the assemblage; and Matt Lamb takes them as a conditional base, allowing freedom of creativity – such as the surrealistic method cadavre esquís or collective creation, if so wanted, and proceeds to paint according to his impulses and intention to transmit a transcendental message through his creative acts.  The work of arts obtained from this union represents the magnificent combination of chromatic exuberance and formality contributed by each artist.

The color of Lamb is diluted in the forms and spaces of Martí Rom´s work, while the forms established by the latter maintain the subtlety of the bas-relief of the sculpture. The work of art assumes its complete plastic message without ever disregarding any other dimension imbued by any of the artists. The result obtained has been achieved because of the collaboration of both artists.

It is also true that each collaborator of this symbiosis has compromised his strict imperative part and it is the new “whole” that has been plastically strengthened. This indicates that nothing has been lost in pairing off, since the aesthetics is the first element that must remain safe in art, second, any element that makes reference to sensitivity and formal emotions and afterwards, being the last but not the least, any messages that may arise from the formal impact.

Beauty, in old times and also today, includes and implies that an aura must be created from all the components of the work, a beauty that is not present in each element individually but, with their presence, they help to ennoble the rest. This is what we obtain from this collaboration between Matt Lamb’s pictorial action and the assemblage by Marti Rom.