Interview
Aaron Aryadharma Matheson
Aaron Aryadharma Matheson is represented by Liverpool St Gallery, Sydney. He lives and works in Newtown and Redfern, Sydney.
Matheson was awarded the Richard Ford travel award, and has been a finalist in the Mosman, Waverley and Waterhouse prizes.
He has a Master’s degree in fine art from the National Art School in Sydney, and a postgraduate diploma in drawing from the Royal Drawing School in London.
What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?
“Drawing is where I started, scribbling in the classroom and creating my own imagined worlds. I’ve been through a few different incarnations: earnest and obsessed young artist, practicing meditator, Buddhist, and a grizzled but, I would say, Utopian realist.”
What inspires you most?
“I find painting extends awareness into the world beyond me. Touch activates inquiry into the outer and inner worlds, and can lead to understanding. Looking at other people’s art is like being granted access into their own worlds and sensibilities, which is a source of joy.”
What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?
“I paint in order to see myself more clearly, and to make sense of life.
The stars and planets are sublime — the unimaginable spaces in our universe, the trillions of stars in our galaxy. To paint is a much more domestic affair, mixing colored dirt and making scruffy marks. Out of the stretch between them, the poetry of painting emerges. The material presence of the pigment and the record of the human hand bring what appears to be a distant horizon and the light of suns and stars back into contact with the mundane. Knowing the gulf between presence and reference in this way is the subject of painting for me. Between the domestic and the cosmic, between our grief and dreams of what we want, between the slow unseen waiting and the bright full moon of understanding.
My works are also a way of creating a sense of wholeness and connection for myself, to tackle a sense of isolation and estrangement. They are therefore compulsive, coming out of a need and desperation to answer the question, how do we have connection in what can seem like a field of meaninglessness and dislocation? Carrying on regardless of this magnifies each painting’s self-awareness, it’s tenuousness and construct. I find an image of yearning for belonging in painting.
I’ve lived with multiple sclerosis for more than 10 years. I walk with a cane and experience some fatigue and pain. Therefore, engaging in painting and exploring the vast inner and outer spaces of the mind and the cosmos imbues my discomfort and limitations with meaning, and even a degree of transcendence.
These are the themes I explore for myself. But I wouldn’t like to limit what others see, so I have no particular message to give others.”
“Art is the action of destroying the illusions of certainty in order to embrace the unforeseen.
As Georges Bataille says, ‘Every time we give up the will to know, we have the possibility of touching the world with a much greater intensity.’”
How would you describe your work?
“One way to define what I do is as a what if exercise. What if I could depict presence, what it is like to be? And I could talk about painting as mind or knowing; a heuristic type of knowing rather than an analytical one. Painting seems to have its own presence or consciousness, rather than being a depiction of it.
This is how it works for me: I use thin layers of pigment and acrylic binder with earth, metal, or mica. Applying paint to a surface extends awareness (mind) into the liquid paint and the world beyond me. There is also an ‘archaeological’ process of rubbing into the texture of the wall beneath and earlier layers of the painting—a discovery that mirrors and parallels a discovery of mind.
The image has to resist and fight a kind of dumbness in the drawing, reflections from the metallic paint, and the physical presence of the material. I’m interested in the brightness and clarity that persists when the knowing inner experience meets the marks, drips, and slashes of the paint.
I’ve switched to using my left hand, as my right hand was weakened by MS. Since then, it has become evident that this knowing is central, rather than dexterity or cleverness. For example, in my painting Galaxy, which you can see below, a field of gold covers a depiction of stars in space, as if to acknowledge how limited my understanding is of the sublime scale and freight of time found there.”
Which artists influence you most?
“I’d like to acknowledge my indebtedness to: Gautama Buddha, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Hilma Af Klint, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Ian Fairweather, Peter Lanyon, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Milton Avery, and Willem De Kooning.”
What is your creative process like?
“Always surprising, boom and bust, intoxication and collapse, happening in the gaps between, taking off nearly as much as I put on, long, slow and stored-up. All so I can get out of the way for painting to happen swiftly and naturally.”
What is an artist’s role in society and how do you see that evolving?
“The artist has a moral and ethical impact in the world. The decisions made in their work reveal the brightness and integrity of the mind that created them.
My work is perfumed by my proclivities and flaws, so I can try to head them off…or not. For example, I have a tendency to shut down too quickly or hide. I can work against my tendency when I can see it. However, I don’t feel this constitutes a role or duty — an external pressure. The force that drives the artist is an internal one: the artist’s own sense of what is possible, what they are prepared to sacrifice, and how they want to influence the world.”
Have you had any noteworthy exhibitions you'd like to share?
“I have shown my works as follows:
2022 - Novus Conchordia, Liverpool St Gallery, Sydney.
2021/22 - Presence of Mind, Lane Cove Gallery, Sydney.
2021 - A Flash of Lightning in a Summer Cloud. Solo at Liverpool St Gallery, Sydney.
2019 - The Waverley Prize: Waverley Arts Centre, Sydney.
2009 - The Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize, Adelaide Museum - Finalist.
- The Mosman Art Prize -Finalist.”
