Art galleries can be places where the grit of life is masked by beauty, elegance, or commercial desire.  Beauty can be very good, transformative even --- but I was startled awake as I walked into Matt Bahen’s new exhibition at Moore Gallery.

The imagery is drawn from news reports that document our era’s wars and displacements.  These are not the heroic moments that will be recorded in the history of victors, but the grief and loss of common people whose lives are torn apart.  In particular, images of refugee camps struck me as poignant distillations of our moment in history.

Thick impasto brush marks are crudely raked onto the canvas, registering both the urgency of the subject, and perhaps the grainy resolution of the source imagery.  These piles of pigment form a material puzzle, yet resolve themselves into compelling imagery of the anonymous victims of our history.  The restricted palette and material struggle within the paintings aptly embody this subject.

Their faces left blank, these are non-players on our political stages.  Yet, as my empathy kicked in, the ambiguities invited me to imagine the particular lives, and particular faces, of people living this moment.

What do these paintings offer, that is more than the source imagery they are derived from?  There certainly was a powerful feeling in that gallery space, as the world’s brutality entered the reified gallery.  The time it takes to make a painting, all of those physically intense brush marks, pull the imagery out of the rapid-fire world of news reporting.  While news is obsessed over and then forgotten,  these paintings attest that these scenes are what is important about our time, and will continue to take our measure in the decades to come.