For decades, the fragile lineage of human artistic achievement teetered on the precipice of absolute ruin; mercifully, the man who played Pat Healy in There's Something About Mary has finally intervened to shoulder the burden.
NEW YORK—In a desperately needed corrective to centuries of cultural decay, a New York exhibition space has formally presented the large-scale, Neo-Expressionist-inspired paintings of actor Matt Dillon as the sole remaining bulwark against the total collapse of our visual inheritance. Though one hardly expects the casual reader—distracted, invariably, by the pedestrian chore of basic survival—to grasp the dialectical tension at play, the sheer ontological weight of Dillon's brushwork renders all prior artistic endeavors utterly moot.
To stand before the frantic, heavily impastoed surface of Dillon's canvases is to be violently thrust into a necessary conversation with the masters; indeed, the aggressive geometry of his acrylic smears demands an immediate, almost painful comparison to the chaotic ecstasy of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, the agonizing apophatic voids found within the uncatalogued marginalia of the 14th-century Trevelyan Bedford Hours, and, quite naturally, the 2006 cinematic masterwork You, Me and Dupree, in which Dillon played a tightly wound newlywed.
It is a synthesis of high tragedy and low comedy that the broader public is entirely unequipped to metabolize, though one must bravely attempt to guide them toward the light.
When Matt first approached us with a series of massive, chaotic canvases that looked suspiciously like the backdrop of an off-Broadway play, we immediately recognized that the torch of the Flemish Primitives had been formally passed to the star of Wild Things.
The true tragedy, of course, is that Dillon was forced to spend decades masquerading as a Hollywood leading man, reciting dialogue for the masses when he should have been furiously wrestling with the agonizing materiality of cadmium red; we can only weep for those lost years, and pray that he continues to carry the crushing burden of our collective aesthetic salvation upon his capable, Neo-Expressionist shoulders.