Matthew Carone Figurative Paintings

Artist: Matt Carone, signed lower right Dated: 1995 Dimensions: 80.25"H x 56.25"L In a fine wooden black and gold gilded frame. Provenance: Freitas Revilla Gallery. Matt Carone (1930-) South Florida artist and gallerist. The Italian- American New Jersey native took up painting in the 1940s after Hans Hoffman asked him to model in a class in which Nicolas Carone, Matt's brother was a student. He has never stopped painting since that seminal experience in Abstract Expressionism. His work reveals a dynamic gestural vocabulary that’s confident, rich in color and texture, and charged with emotion. Matthew Carone opened his famous, influential gallery on Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale in 1959, and in the following decades, he built a roster that included such artists as Wolf Kahn, Leon Kroll, Wifredo Lam, and the great Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta. Meanwhile, Carone quietly continued his own work as a painter, urged on by Matta on his many visits to the area. His works range from pure abstract expressionist painting to figurative expressionism to an almost Surrealist calligraphic abstraction. Carone lived with and posed for Hans Hoffman, and was friends with Roberto Matta, Conrad Marca-Relli, Paul Jenkins, Franz Kline and Wolf Kahn. His paintings, according to Palm Beach Post art critic Gary Schwan, “reveal a spontaneity that recalls the automatic writing of the surrealists. The figures radiate motion, tension and sexual heat in contained spatial constructions.” This painting depicts nude figures reminiscent of the nudes in the famous Pablo Picasso painting Demoiselle D'avignon. His later paintings, perhaps closer to Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly than Matta’s animated stick figures and skeletal machines, step toward the path of patterned abstraction without venturing onto it. Like Pollock, whose lyrical loops carried the private rhythms of an artist enamored of dance, and Twombly, whose staccato, sketchy lines reflect a different temperament, Carone’s inspirations flow directly from a subconscious informed by a lifetime of association with some of the century’s most important artists and their works. Not only is Carone identified with the pioneer generation of Abstract Expressionists, but also critics have seen affinities with Surrealism in his work, as well as development parallel to those of the CoBrA group.” Earlier paintings by Carone, an accomplished musician and violinist, often suggest ensembles of musical instruments, particularly those with strings. Like the drip paintings of Pollock, these works, with their powerful sense of movement and lyrical compositions, sometimes seem like musical passages captured on canvas or paper. SELECT ONE PERSON SHOWS Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL Palazzo Panni Museum, Arco di Trento, Italy Fox-Martin Gallery, Housatonic, MA Lurie Galleries, Boca Raton, FL ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries, Coral Gables (Miami), Florida Georgetown College, Georgetown, Kentucky Schramm Galleries, Fort Lauderdale, Florida Granville Galleries, Coral Gables, Florida Coral Ridge Yacht Club, Fort Lauderdale, Florida Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida The Gallery, Fort Lauderdale, Florida Gallery 99, Bay Harbour Island, Florida Mercer University, Macon, Georgia P.N.Y.K. Gallery, Kent, Connecticut Simons Rock College of Bard, Great Barrington, Massachusetts Freites-Revilla Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida GROUP SHOWS Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, Florida Schramm Galleries, Fort Lauderdale, Florida Roko Gallery, New York, New York Loft Gallery, Coral Gables Florida Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida Brandeis Art Festival, Palm Beach, Florida Drawing Exhibition, Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida Ute Stebich Gallery, Lenox, Massachusetts Florida Pavilion, New York World's Fair, 1965 The Lantern Gallery, Ann Arbor, Michigan The Little Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Tampa Bay Art...