BEING
  Quality (Reference to a Ground),
  Relation (Reference to a Correlate),
  Representation (Reference to an Interpretant),
SUBSTANCE

—Charles Sanders Peirce, “On a New List of Categories,” 1868

It is always going to be paint; you cannot out paint the paint.

—Neil Jenney, New Image Painting, 1978

I’ve always found it easier to describe Mathew Cerletty’s work by saying what it isn’t than by saying what it is. His compositions are too stylized to be realist but too literal to be surrealist; his subjects are too generic to be Pop, too personal to be conceptual, and not quite revealing enough to be overtly autobiographical. Too sincere to be critique, too cool to be romantic. The point of view is so inscrutable, so crypto-normal, that it begs to be decoded and psychologized. But spend a little time in front of these paintings, and a different set of concerns emerges: the way a softly shaded eggshell cuts sharply into flat blue ground, the way a perfectly rendered metallic clasp glints within an almost-abstract rectangle, the way two shades of purple push against each other just enough to delineate a woman’s hips. For all his illusionistic skill and wry cultural positioning, Cerletty can’t out paint the paint—and he isn’t really trying.

End of the Line introduces eleven new paintings made over the past year and expands on a body of imagery Cerletty has developed since 2018. As with his past few shows (Bended Knee, 2024; True Believer, 2022), these paintings depict a single, precisely rendered object—or small array of objects, a row or a stack—situated in the center of the canvas, surrounded by a solid field of color under bright, flat lighting. His source images are taken from found advertisements and refined over time—distilled in the studio, on the computer, through multiple drawings and paintings, into Platonic ideals: the cleanest, brightest versions of themselves. Cerletty’s dry humor pervades the paintings, hitting first as an absurd contrast between the deadpan subjects and hyper-refined style. In Messenger (all works 2025), a manila envelope—the staple of administrative drudgery—is elevated to a sacred icon.

A more lyrical playfulness unfolds within the installations, as the paintings are allowed to converse formally and narratively. Tone and subject jostle with shape and texture: the nubbly surface of terrycloth towels opposite a porous sponge, or the concave eggshell versus the convex sink, form a tone poem about “inwardness” and “outwardness.” Covered body parts (legs in pantyhose, hands in rubber gloves) and household objects (a magenta dog leash) manage to seem at once wholesome and perverse, implicating the viewer’s imagination.

In conversation, Cerletty has called his subject matter “mid” or “normcore.” Narrowing this down, we find that his imagery generally originates from the past few decades and from a culture that used to be called middlebrow. There’s no mining of abjection to expose society’s underbelly à la Mike Kelley, but neither is there a target on luxury, popularity, or aspiration. Whereas artists like Ashley Bickerton and Jeff Koons summoned the talismanic power of brand names, Cerletty’s objects leverage an intense familiarity less aligned with mass marketing than with everyday life. He deploys ubiquity and repetition as strategies, prompting us to see, simultaneously, what we know about a thing and what we know about the thing we call a painting.

A painting is not an image. This is a truism—a point so obvious to anyone who makes paintings or looks at them carefully that it hardly bears stating. But in the last decade, we’ve become accustomed to looking at images of someone’s paintings on a screen and telling ourselves we’ve seen their paintings. At the same time, image-painting is at one of its periodic peaks; so now, as we look at endless images-of-paintings-of-images, we elide the profound differences between “painting” and “image.” Cerletty has made a home for himself just this side of the threshold. After two decades refining his methods, subjects, and technique, he’s narrowed the gap between painting and image until it is a mere sliver—but his work is full of reminders of its material nature.

In In the Beginning, a white egg sits on a bright blue field. Its outline is crisp, all edges in equally sharp focus. The rendering of the egg itself is so soft and impeccably blended that the whole thing almost feels like a joke about skill—or as if the figure and ground are from different paintings: an object from a Dutch still life, enlarged and dropped into an Ellsworth Kelly composition. In Lickety Split, a woman’s legs point upward, sheathed in semi-sheer pantyhose. The diptych contains two pairs—four legs. They’re flesh and not-flesh: in the mind, the skin tone is partly obscured by the semi-sheer black of the tights, but, in paint, there is no real color of flesh revealed underneath. The crook behind each bent knee is smooth, as if cut with scissors. One pair of legs bisects a cool lilac field; the other is surrounded by a paler, pinker hue. Taken apart, we might describe these colors as the same; taken together, as a rhyming couplet, every minute distinction reminds us of a decision made in the studio. In imperfect echoes lies a key to this exhibition—a key to this endeavor.

Skill in rendering is central to Cerletty’s work and has been since his earliest exhibitions. He was trained as a realist (as were many artists and illustrators—skill is notable but not rare). His ability is no gimmick, nor does his work pursue painterly virtuosity as an end in itself; being good at making things look like other things is simply a place to start—the condition under which he paints. While he seems to take pleasure in painting, it’s of a dry, meticulous sort: the satisfaction of a job well done, the small smile at a witticism landed just so. Cerletty doesn’t take pains to hide his hand; there’s no airbrush to recreate a photo finish, and plenty of passages show careful but visible brushwork. Nor are there grand gestures or flourishes to break the surface tension. His mark is unshowy—it can almost be taken for granted, as if images like this simply make themselves. They don’t.

Anyone who has followed Cerletty’s work knows that these paintings represent significant time and labor. There is no post-studio production here. His effort is evident in his surfaces, but in case we don’t quite understand how hard he’s working, Cerletty introduces the leitmotif of the chore. A sponge and rubber gloves in Chore Boy (a blue sponge on a Pepto-pink surface) and Lost Touch (nitrile gloves for studio safety) find analogues in End of the Line (a row of fine-tipped paintbrushes) and Vanity (a white sink recessed in a black surface). The artist is the worker in the studio, and no mystical calling or transcendence elevates him to heroic status.

Yet the show’s title signals deeper themes of divinity, mortality, and the sense of looming crisis that now bubbles up around comfort and stability. Work that once seemed glib, with its relentless focus on the mundane trappings of middle-class life, now reveals an anxious, conflicted spirit—an artist well aware that he’s painting at a super-silly intersection of Instagram burnout and galactic annihilation. Painting at the end of painting: painting at the end of the line. But aren’t we perfectly suited to be here? Hasn’t art always written itself out of the picture, announced its own death, and, with somber fanfare, trumpeted its own resurrection? We’re used to playing this end game. And if we aren’t painting at the end of the line, why bother?

—Mamie Tinkler