In Matt Mitros’s show at Gallery4Culture, smooth, glassine
monochromes erupt. Craters have broken out on these otherwise
undisturbed resin surfaces, which are contained in wood frames. The
little mountainous bodies of the craters are rough, but at the center
of each is a pool of shiny, hard, colored resin. The craters are like
reverse ceramic objects, with glaze on the inside.
Mitros studied in the ceramics department at the University of
Washington, graduating in 2006. According to the materials he lists,
none of the works in his current show is actually ceramic. But even
with resin and wood (the only two materials listed), he exploits the
ceramic-centric tension between surface and substance. The surface is a
tense border; a skin/site of explosive events. Or not quite explosive
but mimicking explosiveness, aping nature. If you look closely, the
artist’s fingerprints are all over the grayish little hills. The hills
express two forces, one real and one symbolic: the artist calmly and
carefully forming them, and whatever the imaginary event was that
pushed them up to disturb this otherwise serene surface. A comparison
to Alex Schweder’s erupting surfaces is inevitable.
But there’s something disturbing in Schweder’s work that’s missing
from Mitros’s events, which are tidy and formal—frozen, safely,
in time. The best expression of this is in three other framed works
with the same glassine surfaces. These surfaces are interrupted not
from within but from air blown on them before the resin dried (or as it
was drying). This creates craters in the surface, but these craters
recede downward, providing a murky view of the surface under the resin
as if you were underneath trying to look out. Where the other craters
top hot volcanoes, these craters were formed by the resin cooling
around the blasts of air.
A large sculpture called Wanderlust treats the gray-painted plywood
floor as the interrupted surface. Frozen rivulets of cream-colored
resin appear to have burst up and pushed a rectangular segment of floor
so it hovers a few feet above the rest. It’s a sort of fountain,
freeze-frame.
Mitros’s works are refined and controlled, representing action at a
remove. There’s attraction and poignancy in this, but don’t be
surprised if it feels a little deferred, too. 
