Memento Mori and Still Life Traditions Inspire Matthew Saba’s Haunting Paintings

In Matthew Saba’s oil paintings, people are imagined as spectral blurs, and landscapes as abstract, sun-dappled terrains. His practice is informed by a wide range of art historical traditions, from memento mori and still life paintings to early, modernist photography. A collection of the artist’s haunting, evocative works was recently on view at Abend Gallery in Denver, Colorado.

The figures in Saba’s paintings are often missing features, or what features they do have are obfuscated by dark, sweeping brushstrokes. In both Paper and Stone (2015) and Untitled I (2015), the subjects are missing eyes, ears, and significant portions of their faces. While a man appears in Gloom (2015) and A Crushing Light (2015), he is missing hands. As if in direct response to these paintings, Untitled I (2015) and Untitled II (2015) feature only hands—but they are disembodied and unattached to a human form. Like a daguerreotype, an early photographic process with a long exposure time, these portraits capture individual gestures and quiet, anticlimactic moments with a poetic sensitivity to the passage of time.

A series of still life and landscape paintings have a similarly fractured, pared-down style. Just as figures’ identities are vague and unspecified in Saba’s portraits, so too are his landscapes set in locations left unclarified. The works feature fragments of the natural world that are vague in their universality: tulips bloom against a bright blue sky in one work, and in another work of similar scale, a moonlit body of water shines with brilliant intensity. While the works are certainly painted in a realist style, details like an oversized moon, a bird flying upside down, and fruit that floats lend the paintings a surreal quality.

The motif of skeletal shapes running throughout Saba’s paintings recalls memento mori, a tradition that harps on the impermanence of material reality and the transience of life itself. Skulls materialize in many forms and in unexpected places: emerging from the inside of an apple, hovering over bowls, coexisting alongside a teapot.