“Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending”

            – George Eliot

Every day, we have the possibility to be moved, to truly acknowledge the variations in our emotions. We often forget this on a daily basis, but you may remember witnessing a sunset or reading a sentence from a book that you will never forget, or maybe hearing a song that suddenly moves you for the first time. These are emotional moments, seemingly simple. And they are small spaces of time in which one manages to stop, connect, forget about the noise.

Matthew Feyld’s works have that gift: they help us to focus for a moment so that we can look rather than see, and it is up to us to allow ourselves to pause and open a dialogue with them. Although at first glance the monochrome paintings may look simple as if made without effort, if we get closer we begin to observe what is behind each one, the dozens of layers of paint that are hidden in order to achieve the exact color reflected on the canvas. For Feyld, a balance between the color and surface structure is essential, and that requires a thorough work.

Although the artist doesn’t consider his work to be minimalist, many of the qualities associated with that movement that emerged in the late 1950s can be found in his paintings: beauty, harmony, order, and simplicity. And we must add its circular shape, which also transmits a sense of unity, elegance, and balance.

According to the writer Muriel Barbery in her book “Une Rose Seule”, Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa visited one day a Buddhist temple in Kyoto. As a young monk endlessly praised the beauty of a pure circle made of stones and sand, the poet remained silent. After a moment, Kobayashi pointed beyond the sand and stones to the splendor of the azaleas and said, “If you go beyond the circle, you encounter flowers”.[1]

When approaching Feyld’s artworks, if we go beyond the circle and look at the sides, we find the union of the painting with the canvas. This is where we can observe the layers and colors that make them up and from here, we can even take a step back and appreciate the circle as a point in the middle of a much larger space. This game of distances and observation forms an intrinsic part of the works, and in fact for the artist it is important that the viewers become aware of their own presence in front of the paintings.

Feyld wants to leave the interpretation of his works as open as possible, which is why this exhibition is entitled “Three Paintings” and the canvases have no title. Immersed as we are today in information overload and a multitude of digital and multicolored visual stimuli, encountering the calm that these works exude can be an experience that is simply emotional, that’s all.

[1] [1] Barbery, Muriel. (2020). Une Rose Seule. Actes Sud.