The View from Here: Matthew Varey's Blueprints of the Universe 
 
Stare at a light.  Close your eyes.  An after image flares; 
white bleeds into orange, dissolving into vascular, pulsing red. 
 
     Resinous and translucent, Matthew Varey's paintings can luxuriate in calm, slow rhythms, or vibrate in a place between stillness and activity.  In this series, Blueprints of the Universe, Varey says he is conscious to remove the "frenetic physicality of his own hand," instead carefully controlling the factors that affect the pigments. The result is an amplified synergy between the artist's intentions and the energies in the materials themselves.  Such alchemy creates dazzling jewelled paintings that evoke references to deep space, planets, biology, or the inner world of human physiology.  Playing along the tantalizing edge of photography and high-tech imaging systems, Varey reminds us that they are blueprints of a universe of his making, a fiction evolving from paint. 
     The works in this series may be described as abstract photo-realism, a significant place to be working from given that we are in constantly changing fields of vision, and technological advances not only allow for new ways of seeing, but also affect what it means to see or be seen.  It's no longer just our exteriors that are under exposure to the probing lens of the camera: the surface has been penetrated.  X-Rays, M.R.I.'s, and C.T. scans have become part of our visual vernacular, thanks to Scientific American, C.S.I., and the Discovery Channel.  Hubble allows us to see the birth of a galaxy on the cover of Time, expanding our visual catalogue of travel photos from places most of us will never visit.  This body of work can be likened to a futuristic Gulliver's Travels, with each work requiring the viewer to acquire an orientation with the image: where am I in relation to  
what I am seeing?  Is this a close up, detail view of something quite large? Something minuscule magnified a thousand times?  Am I in familiar territory?  Am I tiny, or a giant? 
      Visual references are conjured up by Varey's colour choices as these paintings provoke a strong emotional response: blue seas wash across canvases viewed from a satellite in geo-synchronous orbit; red blood cells course through vessels seen through a microscope; green land masses dotted by thunderstorms are mapped by Doppler radar.  We interpret Varey's work as elemental, primordial events.  We follow cosmic gasses along atomic pathways, down gravity wells to enter cellular structures under examination  
in a lab.  Ecology, chemistry and history converge here, captured like a museum sample under the smooth, glassy surface of the painting.  Human frailty looms large in this arena of analysis where the universe and its inhabitants are made from and return to the same matter.  Varey's paintings depict a utopia where aesthetic and scientific manipulations work in concert to create objects of great beauty.  These abstract works speak to the place  
of photography in documenting our world and mapping our futures, and to painting as an articulation of the times. 
 
Priti Kohli & David Brace 
t r a n s i t   g a l l e r y