Algus Greenspon presents Susan, an exhibition of seven new paintings by Mathew Cerletty opening on Saturday, November 5 and running through December 23, 2011. A reception for the artist will be held from 6 to 8 pm on the day of the opening.

Mathew Cerletty paints pictures that were it not for him, would never be made–nor would they be missed. So familiar are these quotidian images that we forget to look. But Cerletty looks and that’s the reward. Looking at what we pass by is knotty. Credulity has its compensations.

Cerletty first gained attention in the early 2000s for refined figurative paintings: portraits of friends, family and the artist himself in psychologically resonant tableaux. His work has since developed with the addition of meticulously prosaic text, decorative abstraction and, most recently, expertly crafted paintings of interiors, home accessories and architectural details.

Cerletty’s subject is emotional memory expressed in the crystalline fog of images that surround us, images we serially forget and selectively recall. Cerletty’s art is the inverse of Pop. Rather than presenting collective signifiers with common meaning, Cerletty remasters these to personal purpose, presenting the familiar in subtly unfamiliar ways. His painting Ikea twists and amplifies the deliberate composition and cliched poetry of big box catalogs. Other paintings include a hand caressing bed linens, a cinderblock wall, a cartoonish abstraction and a sun-filled room ready to receive a coat of paint with selectively isolated details and finely tuned color harmonies that make it worthy of the conspicuous title, Quiet Grace. Cerletty’s dedication to the transformative potential of painting makes his deceptively commonplace imagery self-aware and surreal, at once artificial and heartfelt.

Mathew Cerletty was born in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin in 1980. He has had solo exhibitions at Rivington Arms and Team Gallery in New York and at Office Baroque in Antwerp, Belgium. Work has been included in group shows at Matthew Marks, Andrea Rosen, Mary Boone, Gavin Brown, and The Royal Academy of Art in London. The current exhibition is his first one-person show in New York since 2007.