This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose

(Antonin Artaud. The theater and its double. 1938)

In his most recent paintings of suns, Matthew Weinstein creates phenomena born out of an undifferentiated pool of memory. The titles are place names, yet they are only footholds within the uncertainty of recall. The sun cannot be remembered, because it is pure heat, vitality, and danger. We cannot make it our own. We cannot even look at it. This is its beauty.

Discrete strokes of oil paint form loose horizontal lines that allow the linen and pencil marks to show through. These strokes produce glowing bands of tinted atmosphere and waves of heat. The surfaces can be read as dismantlings of continuous images, or interrupted realizations of them. In the upper center of each painting is a schematized image of the sun composed of diminishing rings of brushstrokes.

The suns are delineated by a circular border of negative space which makes the images flip back and forth between the dream life of memory and the totemic presence of the delineated circle; from intuition to contemplation. The horizontal lines of strokes can be compared to abstract handwriting which form texts that can be felt but not read. Horizon lines in the paintings suggest illusions and endless pursuits.

Our authoritarian mass media thinks for us, but Weinstein’s practice creates openings for self-generated meaning and narrative, as well as material for the consideration of the political, sensorial, and social effects of familiar images and techniques of representation. The queer navigation of personal identity has informed Weinstein’s investigation into the location of the self within a body of work. In these paintings, the self is not an image or a technique. Instead it is the imminence of meaning and being that exists within the ever shifting tones of the sky.

One of the most insidious effects of totalitarianism is the exteriorization and stagnation of our inner lives, and its transformation of our inner lives into propaganda and pure reactivity. As it is with Artaud, we need the sun to continually incinerate repressive forces as it sets, and to turn new and vital ways of being into possibilities as it rises. This is the beauty of loss.