Painting as Illusion

In his expansive practice, Matthew Day Jackson explores various subjects—from the historical and scientific to the futuristic and fantastical. The artist’s first solo exhibition with Pace, on view at 510 West 25th Street in New York through July 1, reflects his deep and longstanding interest in visual paradoxes, particularly the simultaneity of beauty and horror. Named for Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel Against Nature, Jackson’s show is anchored by ten new landscape paintings in which the strange and familiar converge.

In the following text, Jackson discusses the art historical, science fictional, literary, and pop cultural allusions that emerge in his latest works. His statements below have been edited and condensed.

Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans

There are a bunch of books on the shelf above my desk—many of them I haven’t read. They just kind of sit up there, taunting me. Against Nature had been up there for a really long time, and it was Don Eyles, of NASA Apollo fame, who gave me the book nine or ten years ago. It’s a dark comedy, which is what attracted me to it.

As I started reading it, I fell in love with the way it would make me laugh out loud the deeper that I began to understand the main character, Jean Des Esseintes. It was published in the late 19th century, and although it is focused on the musings of Des Esseintes, it captures a moment in time which was the precipice of great change in the fields that interest me deeply. The camera, flying machines, and motorcars were becoming common, and as Des Esseintes grapples with his age, he is unwilling to move forward. He is a man without a place—as if he were a dinosaur aware of his imminent extinction.

Against Nature doesn’t have much of a plot—it’s the reveries of an aged aristocrat entertaining his material privilege and wealth. He’s bubbled himself, removed himself from Paris, out of the salons, and placed himself in a pleasure center where he can entertain all of his sensory interests. One could really think about the book in relation to the ways that people bubble themselves today—whether that’s by disconnecting from the environment through the auditory field of our headphones or the way that social media algorithms follow our clicks and just give us more and more and more of a reality that we can accept as being real.

There’s also this outsized use of resources in the US, as compared with other countries. The material reality of Des Esseintes’s life mirrors that of our present: you can go on Amazon and get a $20,000 Rolex, a sex toy, a can of green beans, cosmetics, and, I don’t know, tweezers, and it all arrives in the same box. I don’t see that slowing down anytime soon. Whether it’s Des Esseintes entertaining himself with a symphony of liquors or perfumes or a turtle encrusted with jewels that dies upon its arrival to his home, there’s this senselessness about it. In the book, there are several moments when the author muses about how means of production have eclipsed that which nature can provide. The bounty of never-ending innovation, abundance, and consumption is a product of our treatment of the environment. We treat the Earth as if it were extraterrestrial, or as if we are extraterrestrial with somewhere else to go.

River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit is really inspiring to me. She has a deep love of nature, and her book River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West is such a beautifully written, brilliantly researched, poignant picture of that intersection of technology and wide-open space. It goes into the technology of the camera and the photograph and how that informed not only science but also painting in the 19th century.

Reading that book framed a lot of the things I was already interested in, and I really fell in love with Solnit’s writing on the early photographer Eadweard Muybridge. She writes about how his images of land and sky in Yosemite were never photographed at the same time, but rather fused together in the dark room. This is how images in science fiction are also made—there’s that same disconnect between land and sky.

19th Century Landscape Painting

I’ve made a lot of work that very directly, very clearly references Albert Bierstadt’s paintings of Yosemite Valley. I’ve always approached Bierstadt—and the way his paintings have come to inform a lot about American identity as it pertains to the American West—through a critical lens. That connects to almost a century of devouring land and moving west all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The concept of “Manifest Destiny” emerged before Bierstadt painted Valley of the Yosemite (1864), but this painting as an image really captures a lot of that ethos—the sort of boundless, unbelievable, brutal majesty of it. The painter and the image maker, as a colonial tool, are really important to think about. I've always thought about Bierstadt in relation to the advancement of Manifest Destiny and the advertising of the American West as a bountiful land that must be inhabited straight away, and everybody in its path will be crushed under the wheels of your wagon and the hooves of your farm animals.

Bierstadt also paid his way out of the Civil War, and his painting about the Civil War—Guerrilla Warfare (1862)—is echoed in one of my new works, Desolation (after Cole / Bierstadt) (2023). You see the tree and the fence present in that painting by Bierstadt and then a reference to the mountain range depicted in the background of Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire (1833–36), which is a series of five paintings.

The Matterhorn

When I was a little kid, I would fall asleep in the back of my grandmother’s Cadillac Coupe DeVille. She had a big, beautiful, brown Cadillac, and I can even remember what it smelled like. We would go to Disneyland and stay there until after the parade. It’s interesting to think of Disneyland as a major public work—it’s not a small part of the 20th century American psyche. Those stories are baked into our childhoods, and, as a business model, it’s all kind of baked into the aspirations of the 20th and 21st centuries—of space exploration, of creating bounty. Furthermore, the creation of a mountain in Anaheim, for me, embodies much of Des Esseintes’s feelings about the progress of society. We humans have learned to create a reality more full than that of nature. With that said, this 21st century reality is not one of production, but rather representation or illusion.