Marcus Matt

Marcus Matt and Samaneh Reyhani share their life and studio. They also share a sense for poetry and miracles. Artistically, however, their expressions are completely different.

Samaneh Reyhani creates the same form, over and over again. Sometimes drawn in the shape of a vagina or a protective seashell. Sometimes it lies down, carved out in marble. Sometimes it flares up like a fire, mighty. At other times it envelops and encloses, lovers perhaps, or children. It resembles a flame, or a womb, but one with sharp edges. Reyhani's other fundamental form is a large ring, sculpted in wood, which appears to be ablaze. It first appeared in her exhibition Executing Desire in 2017, painted, drawn, shaped. It reappears, now painted in the melancholic hue of dove blue, in a gallery exhibition in 2021. Here she envisions it as a symbol of unity, but also of the soul's longing, djaan.

Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations—

Saying, "Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament hath caused man and woman to moan.

I want a bosom torn by severance, that I may unfold (to such a one) the pain of love-desire.

Every one who is left far from his source wishes back the time when he was united with it.

In every company I uttered my wailful notes, I consorted with the unhappy and with them that rejoice.

Every one became my friend from his own opinion; none sought out my secrets from within me.

My secret is not far from my plaint, but ear and eye lack the light (whereby it should be apprehended).

Body is not veiled from soul, nor soul from body, yet none is permitted to see the soul.

This noise of the reed is fire, it is not wind: whoso hath not this fire, may he be naught!

'Tis the fire of Love that is in the reed, 'tis the fervour of Love that is in the wine.¹

Rumi's famous opening to Masnavi-e Ma'navi (which could be translated to "Spiritual Songs") also appears in the introduction to Reyhani's 2017 Master's thesis at the Malmö Art Academy. In it, she describes how closely intertwined pain and love are. She quotes the Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek: "Language should be tortured to tell the truth… The most elementary form of torturing one's language is called poetry."

In Iran, Rumi's songs are considered so important that they are called "the Persian Quran". Reyhani describes how it, as well as another well-known masterpiece, the poetry of the 14th-century poet Shamsu'd-din Mohammed Hafez, are found in every Iranian home. When Reyhani left her native Iran to make a new home for herself, she brought the poets and mystics with her. Rumi is the 13th-century mystic, Sufi, and dervish, who is read and loved far beyond Iran or the borders of the Islamic world. Goethe and Mahatma Gandhi quoted him, as did Dag Hammarskjöld. And Eric Hermelin, the great translator of Sufi and other mystic texts, who, thanks to his adventurous life, mastered Persian perfectly. For over thirty years, he composed his brilliant translations from a room at S:t Lars Mental Hospital. This is precisely what Rumi's mystical love poetry is all about. It is the fool who understands the divine. Through the disappearance of the self, there is room for God in the tavern of the world. The reed flute that Rumi sings of is the self in all its fragility. The wine that intoxicates him is the wine of divine love. The fusion of lovers is physical but, in the same measure, spiritual—there is no difference.

When Samaneh Reyhani came to Sweden in 2015, enrolled in the Master's program at the Art Academy, she brought bitter experiences with her—as well as the rich treasure of Iranian poetry. She was used to being understood if she made a poetic reference among a poetry-loving people. Poetry is a symbolic language—and language is always shared. A full moon also means face, a glass of red wine—love. The mystic also uses this symbolic language, but as a way of pointing towards something beyond our immediate reality. When Rumi, Hafez, and Omar Khayyam use images of wine and physical love, they do so to conjure a certain spiritual state, experienced in the divine as they are. This method was also utilized by Christian mystics during the Middle Ages. When Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, or Jacob Böhme invoked bride and blood mysticism, this was because they knew that these were images that people were familiar with. People know what wine tastes like and what love feels like. But they may not know what it means to be permeated by divinity.

Reyhani transfers this rich poetic legacy to the realm of visual art. It is not necessarily the case that people who see her art need to be familiar with Sufi mysticism. She relies on her figures being recognized and understood far beyond specific cultural contexts. She hopes for a shared recognition of feelings. She shares this hope with some of the central artists of high modernism. Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Constantin Brancusi were all convinced that the image was a membrane through which the artist's mind made direct contact with the viewer.

In particular, Reyhani has much in common with Brancusi. The Romanian sculptor developed a few forms based on the stylistic language and craftsmanship he brought from his home village of Hobita. These forms meet the aesthetics of feeling he learned in Rodin's sculpture workshop, an aesthetics that pays close attention to the expressive ability of the material's surface. Brancusi eventually gravitated towards the purification of form we associate with him today, leading away from the style of the individual towards that which is common. He claimed that everything is infused with meaning. In order to find this meaning the self must forego itself. Reyhani shares this quest with Brancusi. She dares to assert the significance of the spiritual.

"When thought is at rest, the images remain active." The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard dedicated a book to the shape of the flame, a central form in Reyhani's art. The book is called The Flame of a Candle. Here, Bachelard quotes Novalis: "But perhaps only the solitary flame can be an ascensional guide for the meditating dreamer." Bachelard divides the flame in two—one white, rising vertically, the other red, bending towards the wood. In Sufism, the death of the moth in the white flame is a symbol of the soul merging with God. Novalis: "In the flame of a lamp all natural forces are active." The flame becomes living poetry, lending itself as a metaphor for growth.

The art of leaping beyond oneself is everywhere the highest act. It is life's point of origin, the genesis of life. The flame is nothing other than an action of this sort. Thus philosophy begins at the point where the philosophizer philosophizes himself, that is to say, where he consumes and renews himself.²

This could have been Sufi dreaming. The tree is nothing but a blooming flame. Samaneh Reyhani's flames stretch upwards, purifying like fire, or bloom into seeds that hold new life. The scars of pain remain, but transformed.

The first painting I saw by Marcus Matt was back in 2012. I cannot forget it. It depicted a miracle, a cherry tree in full blossom, growing in a tunnel. A group of boys witness the wonder. The cherry tree is a tribute to Carl Fredrik Hill.

Birger Sjöberg describes a similar experience in Kvartetten som sprängdes (The Quartet That Split Up). As a child, Cello follows a friend home to a dark, clattering forge. Through a small door at the far end of the forge, the boys enter another world entirely, a still, lush garden buzzing with bees. For Cello, this becomes an image of miracles in life—leaving the forge and suddenly entering the garden.

Marcus Matt waits for that moment to occur in the studio. Sometimes he waits a long time. He wants to paint in that moment when everything seems to be teeming with life, when he senses a presence. When this occurs, he has to move fast. The small paintings must be made in one sweep, even though the technique is oil and not watercolor.

The large paintings that Matt has been working on for a couple of years require a different approach. The painting simply titled The Work (2024), is the largest piece Matt has presented so far. It is 175 × 240 cm, almost ten times the size he usually prefers. Here, all the hours of waiting in the studio appear close, as if they are just below the surface. It is as if there is a secret world, perhaps a reflection of our own, perhaps entirely different, and the painting is its shelter. Fragments emerge, markers, a figure that echoes a figure by van Gogh. The surface seems to vibrate—Matt paints layer upon layer of two very light shades of red and green, complementary colors, giving life almost without being noticed. Van Gogh's painting of the painter on his way to work was destroyed during World War II. It was a rather small painting. As in a séance, the outline of the walking man is conjured in Matt's painting.

Marcus Matt has image memory. For him, the surface of the painting is not empty when he begins, but filled with reminiscences of other images, like an echo chamber. How can he be certain that the image he captures is the right one? I believe the answer is that he does not know. But he senses something, and this sense becomes certainty when the image is revealed on the canvas/panel/paper.

I am once again reminded of Carl Fredrik Hill, the painter who believed himself to be the greatest in the world when he was considered sane and who really painted fantastic images when he was so ill that he left his self. Hill lived for over thirty years in this other world, filled with images, his own as well as others, terrifying and wonderful. Rumi would have said that only when he left his self did he find his soul. On one level, this also applies to Matt. He seeks the moment when the painting becomes more important than what he wants from it, the moment when it begins to speak. He likens the result to postcards sent from an unknown world.

Matt is an aesthete, meaning that every visual impulse is valued for its formal possibilities rather than any potential narrative. He is meticulous, hence the waiting. The process of painting becomes subtle, lingering, where every brushstroke is important precisely because they are sparse. But sometimes the painting is heavy with almost invisible layers of paint, as in A Thousand Times (2024), sometimes the image is swathed in one color with a single mark (Candle, 2024), or organized according to a rule, as in Flower Sermon (2024). As soon as something resembling a method appears, Matt discards it. Therefore, the paintings remain unique. In this, he has an evident affinity with one of the great contemporary Belgian painters, Raoul de Keyser, a painter's painter who lived and died in the small town of Deinze whose works are found in most major art museums around the world. Matt discovered de Keyser's works already during his studies. De Keyser and Matt share this ability to wait—and to be fully attentive in the moment of action. A moment's complacency, and the presence is lost. For Matt, a painting is also a tangible object, something to grasp and relate to. Through this intimacy, the painting reveals that it is of another world.

A world that is still the same. As if here.

Gertrud Sandqvist