Why do the objects most fully absorbed into daily life carry such weight? Specifically, ordinary items so embedded in routine that they fail to register as discrete forms. Objects that order time, enable work, and structure movement through the day. When examined closely by an artist with the technical mastery and sensitive observation of Matt Magee’s handwork, they re-emerge as objects with presence and consequence.
These small, intimate paintings by Magee capture the beauty and significance of the overlooked and remind us of the complexity and intricacy of a world that we often take for granted due to the commonplace items that allow us to function. Magee has chosen to focus on the mundane, approaching each painting with the same disciplined attention that has defined the artist's abstract practice. Each subject is treated as a system of relationships—shape, interval and color—compressed into a contained field. Double Helix, for instance, reads initially as pure abstraction—two loosely tangled forms suspended against the picture plane—until closer observation reveals each to be a cluster of five overlapping rubber bands, rendered in an elegant monochrome tone.
Magee's career spans more than four decades. Educated at Pratt Institute and long active in New York, including years working in the studio of Robert Rauschenberg, before relocating to Scottsdale, Arizona in the past decade. His work has been consistently engaged by critics and institutions, with attention from writers such as Roberta Smith and Susan Tallman. His long artistic history situates these paintings as a continuation rather than a shift: an extension of an established language into a different register.
In these masterfully painted works the object remains the primary focus, but its function recedes as its formal properties come forward. Edges, repetitions, and internal structures take precedence. The familiar is presented as a visual problem and recognition gives way to analysis. Switchback enacts this process: its subject is the laser-cut steel cover of a thermostat in the sauna of Magee’s gym—an object of pure utility, chosen for its geometry and the specificity of its context. Thorn Chart arrives at this from another angle, presenting a gridded sheet of Avery mailing labels from which the labels have been removed. What remains is a lattice of adhesive outlines and negative space that, given a moment's attention, becomes a subject of visual fascination.
Magee’s approach aligns with a longer trajectory in modern art. The exhibition New Painting of Common Objects, organized by Walter Hopps in 1962, articulated the potential of everyday imagery to sustain serious attention. Artists associated with that moment, including Wayne Thiebaud and Ed Ruscha, treated the vernacular as material for sustained formal inquiry. Earlier, Giorgio Morandi established a career-long engagement with modest arrangements of bottles and jars, demonstrating that limited means can yield complex results.
Magee's work operates within this lineage while maintaining its own processes and concerns. Objects are selected for their structural and visual properties as much as their use. They present visual constraints that engage the attention of the viewer, causing them to see what is often overlooked - curves, tensions, alignments all coming together in each painting of Magee’s careful observation. The artist isolates and examines an object allowing the viewer to reconsider its role within our lived experience. This attention is direct and unsentimental. The objects are not elevated beyond themselves; instead, they are seen with precision. The act of looking becomes the central operation, and these paintings reward the viewer in that process.
