John Mattson, Blue Star Arts Complex, San Antonio, TEXAS
“Starting Anew” 21 x 26”, mixed media on paper, 2025
By William W. Sokoloff
San Antonio-based artist John Mattson works out of his detached studio at his house, located one mile south of downtown San Antonio. His opening at the Blue Start Arts Complex, titled “New Year, New Work,” consists of ten paintings that draw from a wide palette of aesthetic media, including acrylic, oil pastel, water-based crayon, graphite, charcoal, and dry pastel. The ten pieces featured are on paper. The exhibit showcases his art created from May to December 2025. The opening was on January 1, 2026.
The art straddles realist representation and abstract phantasmagoria. The viewer is struck by the naïve simplicity in the art that is captivating and seductive. As one dives deeper into the paintings, one enters a world of bizarre animal/human assemblages, impossible formations, geometrical riddles, collapsing energy, and paradoxical structures. One senses that the pieces offer a poignant commentary on the predicament of being alive today, where reality is in flux and dislocated. Sources of dislocation can be found in techno-medico seismic shockwaves bursting through the dream of a once-settled, stabilized reality. There is no yearning for a lost past in these pieces. Mattson is not a reactionary conservative. A former union journeyman, Mattson is on the side of the downtrodden, workers, migrants, trespassers, and the dispossessed. His paintings arguably give voice to their defiant screams.
“Happy Dance” 21 x 21”, mixed media on paper, 2025
Most of the paintings are 21 by 21 inches; two are 21 by 26 inches. The pieces have a horrifying, nightmarish aspect that exists alongside a redemptive and utopian orientation. Take “Happy Dance,” a piece that is far from unequivocally happy. It is one that invites reflection on the ways humans are forced to dance in the daily theatre of institutionalized powerlessness. The way hunger and work force us to dance in response to various social scripts demanding submission and thankfulness for the opportunity to be oppressed. “A smile is a part of the uniform,” or so the saying goes. In “Happy Dance,” dancing also alludes to resistance and breaking free from authoritarian proclamations. The happy dancer is frenzied and recalls the dance of decimation in Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring).
“Night Thoughts” 21 x 21”, mixed media on paper, 2025
If one were to make connections with the artistic lineage in Mattson’s work, one can sense traces of Paul Klee, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Francis Bacon. The conductor and composer Pierre Boulez explored the notion of “fixed explosions” in his music. One sees what this might look like in Mattson’s paintings. With Mattson, reality is jagged, unresolved, terrifying. Within the geometrical structures in his paintings, the human is besieged, swarmed, attacked, infected, yearning, imprisoned, dismembered, electrocuted, spinning, and trapped in a maze. But this horror is the surface. Much more is contained in each piece, something gentle, full of life, rich, lovely even. If the pieces were turned inside out, they would mirror what they already are. Mattson holds impossible polarities together. One sees this explosive dynamic unfold in his work of shadows, labyrinths, and Kafkaesque predicaments.
“Feeling Penitent” 21 x 21”, mixed media on paper, 2025
Mattson’s deployment of color complements thematic content by way of exaggerating it. In his pieces, yellow is sharp and cuts next to pink. Geometrical lines in black hold everything together. Mattson’s work engages the history of art as much as it stares directly into the face of the viewer without flinching. There is harmony in chaos, and chaos in harmony, but sometimes, the two just keep slapping our faces. This, I suppose, is what it means to be alive.
There is nothing false, pretentious, fake, or deceptive in Mattson’s work. One sees and hears the improv jazz of art in these ten provocative pieces. The scale and size of the ten pieces lead to serenity, but they summon inner hyenas, gathering and circling, bursting off the paper. One can also see the trace of swans, gliding into the dreamy starlit sky. In the words of Mattson, “for over forty years there has only been once overriding theme in my work…to create paintings that are unrestrained reflections of my reactions to the world and my life. I am trying to reflect, in my own way, the common themes of memory and regret and the joys of being alive.”
John Mattson earned a BA and MA from Humboldt State University in California. His MFA is from Mills College, Oakland, CA. He currently resides in San Antonio with his partner, the artist Karen Zimmerly.
