Matt Dillon: Porto-Novo to Abomey

All creativity is at heart collage. Now, before you freak out, yes, people have defined creativity all kinds of ways: from the scientific (“solving an intractable problem with an irrational solution”) to the swirly (“just expressing my feelings”) and more. But technically this one-word answer works just as well — creativity is just putting things together in a new way. And isn’t that what collage is? Arranging, joining, articulating things differently? 

The artist and actor Matt Dillon articulates things differently than most artists. That is partly because professional artists today are schooled not just in how and why to make art with rigor, but to articulate with rigor how and why to make it. Dillon’s education was that of the amateur. His family had a long artistic tradition. His father and grandmother were both painters. Two great uncles were famous midcentury cartoonists behind the iconic comic strips “Flash Gordon” and “Blondie.” As a kid, Dillon was a perpetual collager and drawer. But if anything is going to sidetrack a boy from making art, it’s becoming a successful actor at 15.

He got more seriously interested in art in his late ‘20s, when he became friends with the L.A. art dealer Patrick Painter.  In the ‘90s, his enthusiasm for his own work took off, and he started bringing art materials — “whatever would fit in a suitcase” — to film locations to help turn unpredictable downtimes into something more productive and imaginative. Over the years, he focused on it more and more; in 2016 he finally got an art studio in Manhattan and started painting. 

Yet even through all his exposure to contemporary art, his own work has stayed refreshingly free of its dominant aesthetics, mores and polemics. His new show of work, most of it inspired by his time in Senegal making Claire Denis’ new film “The Fence,” is the perfect illustration. Dillon’s mushy, murky shapes and figures flirt with the vast history of abstraction and the basic principles of composition, myth and color, but they’re also brimming over with traces of the aesthetic impressions he spent months soaking up in Africa  — from textile and architectural elements to town planning maps and whole landscape vistas.

Some of the most intriguing works stem from playful interactions Dillon had with some local children, during which he handed them his sketch book and asked them to sketch something for him. Dillon incorporated their names — like “Douk Pon”— into a few paintings as a kind of dedication. 

As this winning story suggests, the exhibit is above all a window into Dillon’s open-thinking, free-ranging approach, as well as his compulsively collaging mind. It’s a refreshingly unvarnished view of the human creative process. Dillon works in his own personal, yet oddly universal, language that blurs painting and printing, quoting and gesturing, referencing and imagining. Dillon’s rigor is anti-rigor; he employs the same mixture of intuitions and plans that governs how creative projects actually come to fruition.

This is not collage for collage’s sake. This is more like a roll of the dice — but 30 or 40 dice that Dillon makes himself, each roll a new combination. It’s not a technique they teach professionally, but given that amateur once connoted someone that loves something, maybe more artists might rethink what amateur standing really means.

– David Colman