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Dan Mate is a painter who for a number years has taken his bearings from a culturally sedimented (modernist) idiom of geometric abstraction. His work appears both untouched by various interrogative endgames of modernism and unconcerned with opening painterly practice onto the realm of art in general, or of rendering ready-made (desublimating) a type of formalism committed to the specificity and autonomy of aesthetic experience. This is despite a tendency in available accounts of Male's work to speak of extensive historical influences including: Bellini, Pontormo, lngres, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, late De Kooning, James Turrell, and Ad Reinhardt among others.
In my view, Male's paintings are not principally about the discursive, art historical structuring of our reception of works of art. Rather, as Michele Helmrich has proposed, his paintings call for prolonged and patient attention to the smallest details of their composition. We are asked to focus on the signifying logic of the paintings as well as their interaction with the white gallery wall. In the current climate of art criticism governed by various paradigms of externality, these paintings call for a formal orientation grown rusty from lack of use.
The work in this show could be located within the Kantian analytic of the beautiful with its emphasis on formal boundedness and an agency that appears to emanate from the work rather than the spectator, the maker or historical circumstance. Here a kind of pleasure is generated by a harmonizing of formal relations that precludes any (sublime) encounter with either a threatening or charismatic excess of painting as a practice that produces something for us to see. At least I shall start with this premise and proceeding as