Cnayvmeph (The Wedge)

I’m not sure how deliberate a painting like Mathieu Malouf’s Cave-Dwelling Nymph (2023-24) is in the parsing of its own references. I don’t mean the nods to art history (mythology and maybe Ingres, for one) or the motions to beer-soaked deliberations of Figurative Painting or Bad Painting, but instead to zoology. Penguins, I learned, belong to the taxonomic order of Sphenisciformes, which derives etymologically from the Greek prefix sphen, meaning “wedge.” Wedges are this painting’s most interesting grammar. Already mimesis wavers in Cave-Dwelling Nymph — there’s the overly shadowed rock faces and the girl’s wobbly gestalt and the indeterminate splotch of aqua in the sky. But the wedges, often affixed onto the canvas in the form of ceramic plates, insist on the painting’s act of failure; in one instance toward the bottom, this spheniform might describe the penguin’s loping, scalloped foot, but elsewhere it becomes a peachy, conchal deposit or an albescent fleck or old-fashioned flatness. The tableware on the woman’s hair is especially fucked: not illusionistically verified, not visually decorative — a punctum of randomness.

The Wedge is kind of like the Cylinder attributed to Cézanne’s inventions or the Sickle people see in Cubism, but it’s way more leftover. Everything hinges on these other shapes in modernism, yet the wedge is incidental, accidental, not structural — B-side morphology. If anything the wedge welcomes on to the stage the oversized abstractions by Picabia (bien sûr, he has had New York painting in his lined pockets for a while now). “Wedge” is already a terrible-sounding word: the consonantal wecg and wig are in its etymology. Like the percussive fricative of its phonetics, wedges are the painting’s bones in the throat. They are the half-hearted gesture to “assemblage” and a chilling reference to American art. They are horrible in Malouf’s work but the more I look at the salmon protrusion above the penguin’s face, the more beautiful I find it. One of Picabia’s tiles is Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic) which was formed by alternately resequencing letters from the words étoile and dans. It is impossible to say and lovely to read.

The wedge has nothing to say to the sinewy mass that is the chaise at the bottom of Cave-Dwelling Nymph. I can only say I’m impressed by it. Malouf’s touch is softer than it needs to be. Light clusters, gathers, and then leaks out in its folds. Darkness throws itself around fleshy pleats and ruffles. This meat-thing stops the painting from being just a matrix of slotted-in citations. Not because embodiment is truth but because the pink surface is painted well, whereas the Ingrean lady asks for nothing more than some tone and a quick contour, and, I suppose, her avian companion. And that creature is abused in more ways than one — trapped in the clutches of an officer of Art History but also left to melt and degrade into a crawl of oil. One more plate on top of it as a final insult or nonchalant ornament or worse yet, the readymade.