Mathew Cerletty: Full Length Mirror

Mathew Cerletty creates eerie hyperrealist portraits of everyday objects

The idealized household objects of New York–based painter Matthew Cerletty (born 1980), scaled up and isolated on single color backgrounds, float in a purified, contaminant-free space. The objects are familiar, even jokingly so, but resist apprehension. Cerletty’s subjects always return a scrutinizing gaze, seeking connection with a viewer who might catalyze the work’s completion. As Chris Sharp writes, “How to account for the work in Mathew Cerletty’s Full Length Mirror? What drives this artist to paint these things? What could possibly impel him to depict a jet ski, a green ottoman, a brown leather belt, a laundry rack or white ceiling molding with such bright, marvelously matter-of-fact and painstaking realism? The funny thing about this is that the natural inclination to solving this mystery is not necessarily to dwell upon a single painting or drawing, but to look at another, and then another, in hopes of shaking out the fils rouges between them. It’s as if they, not individually, but as a sequence, are supposed to gradually disclose their enigma, rebus-like, collectively yielding it up like a decoded secret. And yet the more you glance between the works, the more opaque, enigmatic and inscrutable they are liable to become.”