This essay was first published online at Roborant Review on September 4, 2025.

 It might be strange to call Danae Mattes, an artist who enlists evaporation, gravity, and patience as creative collaborators, an action painter. Yet, the raw emotion and surrender to serendipity integral to her process invite the viewer to contemplate similar existential questions. Individual freedom of expression, the chaotic nature of internal and external reality, and the symbiotic role of the viewer in ascribing meaning to a work of art – they’re all there. 

Unlike Jackson Pollock, a notable exemplar of action painting, Mattes opens a dialogue that feels more like an invitation to consider rather than a challenge to debate. Hers is an activation of perception closer to Helen Frankenthaler’s sensuous soak-stain meditations. One can approach them as visual koans. 

How much of existence do we actually control? Why do we humans feel the need to assert sovereignty over our surroundings? Over other beings? Over mortality? How best to measure a life? By the finished product or the angle of repose? Each of her paintings opens several paths of inquiry and wonder.

Philosophy aside, what of water, dust, and light? Mattes’ presentation of new work at Dolby Chadwick Gallery consists of over a dozen large-scale paintings. To create these paintings, the artist pours clay directly onto canvas, frequently adding mica to the mixture, to produce landscapes that resemble the actions of the earth. One can perceive tectonic shifts, wind erosion, deserts, cave formations, hot springs, and the swirling waves of the ocean in the artist’s compositions. These are portraits of flux. They are as beautiful as they are stirring. 

As with many of Mattes’ clay paintings, “Vault” could be an architectural model of a satellite image. It looks like the Bonneville Salt Flats as seen from space. Gaze longer, and the face of a sea otter or bird appears. Longer still, and one can begin to see the passage of time captured in the delicate skin-like cracks and folds of the clay. What once seemed to be dust becomes cloud-mist. Shadow merges with feature as light dances between shifting dimensions. 

Mattes can transport the viewer from the macro world to the micro. “Of Water, Dust, and Light, V” reminds me of my scientist mother’s electron micrographs of the endothelial cells, which form the vital interface between blood and surrounding tissue. It’s remarkable how similar the landscape of our biological selves is to that of the planet upon which we all depend. In the same way that the Earth seen from space honors no congressional districts or other human-drawn lines of occupation, our bodies from the inside reflect no differences of race, faith, ethnicity, gender, education, or income.

My personal history and patterns of thought have become mixed into these visual songs of experience. The process is organic. How can one engage with so primal an element as clay and not enter the realm of mythology? For what ancient culture or religion doesn’t have a story tracing the fashioning of humankind from clay dust? 

A painting like “Rising III” almost seems to capture Panthalassa, the ocean surrounding the supercontinent Pangea before it began to break apart. Imagine if we all saw ourselves as sharing the same landmass, the same great ocean?

These aren’t everyday thoughts. That is the blessing of art. It opens paths that we don’t normally enter in the commerce of navigating parking garages or office politics. It also lifts us, even for a moment, above the immediate concerns of climate collapse and ceaseless wars, for long enough to believe that individual acts matter. This is the true alchemy –  in which thought becomes substance.

Especially in weeping
the soul reveals
its presence
and through secret pressure
changes sorrow into water.

Valerio Magrelli, translated by Dana Gioia

Danae Mattes, Of Water, Dust and Light, runs September 4-27, 2025, at Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco. Opening reception on Thursday, September 4, 5:30-7:30 p.m. 

Danae Mattes was born in Rochester, Pennsylvania. She earned her BFA from Edinboro State University in Pennsylvania and an MFA from Long Beach State University. Mattes’ work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, most recently “Where the River Widens” at the BYU Museum of Art and “Transitory Waterscapes” at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, as well as the collaboration “Lightfast: Intertwine” at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. She has been commissioned to create public artworks nationally and internationally, and has collaborated extensively with Hope Mohr Dance. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, and Museum Schloss Landeck.