We went by Randi’s studio in downtown LA. Right in the heart of it. Seventh and Main, where U2 played on the roof in 1987. She had been working in her garage across town for a few years and the work she made there, painting and drawing, was on small and medium surfaces – but it was always outsized in its boldness. Since the lockdown she ditched the garage for this studio space in a building with small ropa companies clanging thru the hallways, hangers and dresses on wheeled racks.
The studio has allowed her to go big. The boldness of those wincing faces, forms and facades that seemed trapped in her smaller work now explodes on these large surfaces, canvasses and unrolled paper sometimes taller than her. The pictures are an assertive expressionism, heir to painterly propositions from outcasts like Soutine and Ensor, a sneering at the concept of prettiness, a gallon of liquid angst sopping a paintbrush as it rips apart optical attempts at cohesion. This is painting the human experience as a frayed dance with malignancy. And of course, she is a polite hostess for our visit, with tea and soda selections to go with the pizza we brought.
At first it seemed funny, perhaps slightly ironic, to be noshing and gossiping as we took in such raging, excruciating pictures and gabbed about the price of oil sticks and the safety of turpentine ventilation – I had brought my artist wife and the talk of paper thickness filled the air. Shop talk alienates me, I want the artist to be a magician, I don’t want to hear about the ink with which they write their spells. So the view out the window seemed a magnificent option. I walked over to the old panes on a day so smoglessly clear that the hills of El Sereno seemed six blocks away, the snowcapped mountains pretending they were closer than Dodger Stadium.
Suddenly though, the view grew ill. I saw an abomination in the forefront of the breathless urban landscape out the studio window. They’ve gone and painted the pre-midcentury signage for the massive Hotel Cecil with some slick urban symbolganeering. God damn this anti-aesthetic sensibility that poisons words by making them stand-ins for art, that uses pathetic symbols for their universal appeal in the way that DDT was used for the greater good until every bird’s egg in America was poisoned. The Toxic Positivity of a blue heart and “DTLA” on blank spaces hung there like middle fingers to any Angeleno who cares; the bland mediocrity of imperious “planners” was writ large where once commercial signage captured the zeitgeist of Chandler and Fante and then stood for decades beyond, still there for us to get a crumb of what once was.
What sane person couldn’t turn from this horror and look away from the window, back into the artist’s studio? They would be relieved to see the expressionistic truth of what our bodies, our collective psyche and our individual spirit are up against. Out her studio’s window was a repudiation of human achievement, exalting the toddler-intellects of civic imbeciles and their anti-aesthetic quest to destroy any icon greater than their Masters Degree in ruining cities. Their simple recipe was to combine bad art with shitforbrain sloganeering. They erase our collective memories and then tell us what to do with our bodies.
Meanwhile, in her studio there was art as a challenge, a serving up of tension to be cautiously engaged. She paints compromised bodies, wounded psyches, the abandonment of the collective will. She paints the truth in an apolitical expressionism that has an eternal, if mortal, ring to it. The tense expressionism of Randi Matushevitz is a tonic for our times. A tonic of tension can be the only cure for the toxic, moronic positivity this ruined society’s leaders demand we ingest. Do we just guzzle their hemlock or do we embrace an art that refuses to be nice and pretty, popular, compliant or sweet as if our lives depended on it?
–MG
