Gordon Robichaux is pleased to present And My Unnamed Corners, the first exhibition in New York by Melbourne-based artist Matlok Griffiths. For his debut, the artist presents a group of intimately scaled oil paintings, many with irregular sculptural surfaces, as well as six framed works made with gouache on crossword puzzles culled from newspapers.

Each of Griffiths’s paintings starts with an “off the shelf” canvas, no larger than 16-by-24 inches, which he orients horizontally, modifies using a combination of rudimentary construction methods, and covers with newspaper in a process akin to papier-mâché. As Griffiths explains, “After the junctions are smoothed out with the printmaking paper and the whole thing is dry, I newspaper over it to tighten it all up. This strengthens it and eases any transitions around the corners. Finally, I prepare the face of the painting with fifteen to twenty coats of gesso, which I lightly sand between each application.”

Once the canvases are prepared, Griffiths applies oil paint to their tactile surfaces,such that each of the works evidences its own organic logic: wobbly fields of semi-opaque colors—blue, yellow, red, and black—layered and abutted against each other; horizontal swipes of pigment—green, orange, and black—that meld into spectrums; and translucent washes of airy color pushed around the surface with jaunty brushwork. The sides of each object are left unpainted (with an allowance for layered drips of color that spill over from the face), exposing the underlying newsprint montage. Here, along the perimeter, color collides with fragments of cut-up text, comics, and puzzles. It’s a site of discovery for both the artist and the viewer, with allusions to the screwball adjacencies that inspire Griffiths’s titles: Beast Sponge, Tolstoy in Forest, Galaxy Slang, Mee Drinks Catastrophe….

Griffiths’s use of papier-mâché evolved out of his daily painting routines. During a trip to New York and Los Angeles in 2017, he began cutting out blank crossword puzzles from newspapers, which he pasted into sketchbooks—one to a page—to create a prepared format. The serial structure and intimate scale lend themselves to his ongoing series of inventive gouache paintings, Yesterday’s Solutions, which rhyme with and against the grid. Griffiths recalls: “During the pandemic, I painted these small works at the kitchen table with the radio on in the background—often after washing the dishes and putting the kids to bed at night.”

After seeing Griffiths’s crossword puzzle paintings in an exhibition, his parents began forwarding their newspapers, the enclosed puzzles peppered with their doodles, linguistic queries, and solutions, all of which the artist cuts out and incorporates freely into his work. In turn, the crossword clippings yield piles of newsprint remainders, which he salvages as raw material to papier-mâché the paintings. Throughout, Griffiths’s economy of materials and means facilitates his exploration of a distinct poetics of color, text, image, and process.