Matthew Thomas looks within

It smells good at Angels Gate—eons from Long Beach, yet on the same port. It smells New Englandy, somehow, although without the chowder. Maybe it doesn’t smell New Englandy, now that I think on it. Maybe it’s just the rosemary bushes and Pedro’s omnipresent breeze. Maybe the New England sense comes from the big clapboard buildings with their desperately peeling paint, a lack of traffic, and room to roam.

It puts you in a mellow frame of mind.

Taking the somewhat rickety stairs to the top of two galleries showing “Too Busy for Love,” one moves slowly. One can take one’s time. And that’s exactly the right approach for Matthew Thomas’ small encaustic works. One needs patience to appreciate their simplicity—small blocks framing mandala-like shapes, some lotuses, some stars of David, shining through the waxen layers that form a hazy, semipenetrable, glaucomal film.

“Too Busy for Love” is a retrospective, and so it’s natural there’s a dated feel. Today we want more pop and zazz, a sugar shock of intense hue, and Thomas rarely plays along. There are a few strong jolts of color—in Hourglass Sigil, pure cobalt is shot through with silver chrome, and “Too Busy” has more than its share of gold leaf or foil. (My favorite was a schmutzy air filter, a few of its slats gilded: the human stain redeemed with a few spokes of the celestial.) But mostly the colors are more meditative, muted pumpkins and ochers, sepia covering geometric grids. It’s zen as autumn of the soul.

Most of the works are as repetitive as an om, with only slight variations throughout. The central element of almost every work is a simple design—almost Spirographic in feel, but not in detail. Shapes that look like an eighth grader’s atomic model take center stage in many. At other times, it’s a simple flower shape or triangle or star. The deviations come in the hues employed, and also in the framing—surrounding these works are additional panels, darkly monochromatic and heavy with texture. It’s ur-impasto, minus the layers of paint—maybe wax again, or maybe clay? Some seem charred; others have what look like tire tracks smushed in them. They are gnarled, and destroyed. The peace is at the center.

At times, Thomas mixes in string, so that it rains out from his panels like water spouts. This doesn’t add much to his mandalas, and has been done. It isn’t offensive; it’s just been done. Perhaps too their readiness, bursting as they are from the surface, take away from his more subtle images, which one must excavate beneath the wax.

At one end of the gallery are a few small collages, making clear (if it wasn’t already) Thomas’ intent. There is This World and the Spiritual World, there is Ancestors. They take kitschy shots of Africans and Native Americans, and overlay them on tussling East Asian gods. They’re goofy and sweet, utterly without malice, and more simplified than we’re used to our collage being. They are a man seeking his place in the past and the present—we see Thomas generations ago in Africa and his current incarnation as a Buddhist lay monk. They’re as peaceful and gentle as anything else in “Too Busy.” If they comment more on Thomas’ own earthly being than on the cosmos outside it, well, we write what we know.

MATTHEW THOMAS: TOO BUSY FOR LOVE ANGELS GATE CULTURAL CENTER | 3601 S GAFFEY ST | SAN PEDRO 90731 | 310.519.0936 | ANGELSGATEART.ORG | TUES-SUN 10AM-5PM | THROUGH MARCH 30

Tags: angels gate, art, buddhism, matthew thomas, San Pedro, too busy for love