an on line exhibition presented by LA Louver Gallery, Los Angeles, February 2026

“whereas life or reality confines itself to proliferating within the instant, the mind has spun for herself the myth of myths, the undefined element of all myths—which is Time…”

Paul Valéry, 1928

All my thanks to Paul Valéry’s spirit, who assisted me and helped me to decipher Matt Wedel’s plates. All the quotes are from ’A Fond Note on Myth’.

A FEAST FOR THE MIND

by Rosanna Albertini

A dinner for a hungry mind, a forest of branches longing for tentative movements, the same efforts of a vine that elongates her limbs to embrace a dead tree — secretly wishing to bring him back to life? 

Let’s blend gradually into our “natural depth and darkness” a place in which the mind looses clarity and gives up, for a while, with problem solving, efficiency, organizing, planning, or looking for fast revolutions, faster political changes, misled by illusions. As if dreams could have a practical side and could walk on a carpet of money plus will to become reality. 

In the penumbra – as the curtain is down –  the mind forgets  how to be busy, then walks on the irregular streams of the imaginary world, only guided by uncertainty, mistakes, hesitations and an infinite number of possibile images or words. No explanation is required, yet the mind sees far, ahead and behind, and is cuddled in between, resting on an impossible, soft image of the present — something that doesn’t exist, a transparent cloud.

From there the mind gives birth to events, stories, situations setting on the table “a candid cosmology,” and more and more naive images nourished by a need of broken causes, human stretches of time, and simple actions: if our heads share a field of blue, shall we call it sky or water? The image doesn’t know. Because, it’s a matter of language, either made of visual signs or words. It is just story-telling; a true intuition sometimes, or a shredded cloud. 

“All our language is composed of brief little dreams.”

Matt Wedel is so familiar with the almost natural transformation -looking natural- of heads and vegetal bodies into ceramic creatures, that I’m sure he doesn’t decide what he is making. So many myths are in him, in the garden which is his body, where every part interacts incessantly with near and far parts, with lack of separation between the busy chemical activity of the cells, the movable forest of neurons, and the constant request from outside to open the doors of the mysterious organic machinery, that he has to react creating new myths. Children do it incessantly, with no restraint, before writing and reading educate them to a strange unnatural style: the linear universe. Masters of brief little dreams as they were in the beginning, they quit the imaginary island where it was hard to distinguish dreams from reality.

Rational clarity kills the myths. And “the fauna of vague things and vague ideas wither away… Myths decompose in the light spread by our body combined to utmost degrees of consciousness.”

Apparently, such a disaster doesn’t happen on Matt Wedel’s plates: ideas remain vague. The upcoming risk of disappearance seems incorporated in the way stories are painted and cooked. It’s a physical process. Stories are not easy to decipher. The figures’ edges are soft, flowers are no more than spots of color. The naked cavalier is a white ghost on the back of a goat lost over an unfamiliar site of emptiness. Two women in conversation are on their way to dissolve among the flowers that invade the plate, while both women and flowers start vanishing under the power of the light. Red fruits on a tree aren’t sure where they sprout from: a tree or a head?  

My favorite plate (also Dominique Moody’s favorite) is a pre-copernican cosmology: the universe is flat. The long curve of hair woven into a braid, in continuity with the curve of vapor from a boiling pot, are a circle of fantasy flowers around the young girl face to face with the beast.  (First image, under the title)

Another girl? Another plate. Maybe she is not, a bow is on her hair, but the body is brown, soft with fur like a teddy bear. The packed non-geometry of stones behind her tells a story of undefined emotions, there could be danger in the air. 

Once more, details are canceled by light in the plate of the woman giving birth. The contrast is striking between the figures of fear around her, even in her arms, and the placid resilience of her body. Upside down pots become masks. They are incapable to close their mouths. Red, brown, bloody.  From the depth of time to the physical depth of the major event in human life. I do remember. I loved to keep the nine months of pregnancy a mystery revealing some of itself at each day. I refused to read books or ask for medical details. Little by little I slipped into the awareness of my animal nature, waiting with joy for the miracle at the end. I was kissed by the sensation of belonging to a time without Chronos, bringing to light a new human being. Out of me, she stood in another time, forever separate from me. It was the only moment I knew without doubt that names, identity, documents, are dead leaves. I was one with any living beast on earth. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Paul Valéry, ‘A fond note on Myth‘ in The Outlook for Intelligence, Princeton University Press, 1989

from Bollingen Series XLV, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Edited by Jackson Mathews Copyright 1962 Translation by Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews.

This selection was first published by Harper & Row, Inc. in 1963