Matthew Day Jackson: ‘​​I want digital and analogue to fit together perfectly so we can regain our hands’

In his first exhibition with Pace Gallery in New York, the American artist-designer Matthew Day Jackson tackles a wide range of subjects, from the historic and scientific to the spiritual and fantastical. Titled ‘Against Nature’, the show sees Jackson expand his interest in finding similarities between binaries and dichotomies, particularly when it comes to the simultaneity of beauty and horror. 

While his process is deeply rooted in research and experimentation, Jackson treats conceptual and physical anchors just as significantly. In ten new landscape paintings, Jackson brings together a seemingly disparate range of starting points, from the 1884 novel, Against Nature, by Joris-Karl Huysmans, which sees a French aristocrat leaving Paris for the countryside where he exploits natural resources to fuel his insatiable desire for luxury and beauty, to the motion-based and darkroom work of the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, Jackson has created a series of unearthly landscape scenes that feature distorted perspectives and uncanny colouration. 

In recounting where the creative process started, Jackson says, ‘I am fortunate enough to spend my summers and some of the winter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; I have loved the mountains since I was a kid. This innate love combined with WG Sebald, Rebecca Solnit, Thomas Cole, and a career-long interest in the imaging of the American West, [as well as] reading Huysman's novel and the pandemic NFT/digital art hiccup made me also consider my history of printmaking and fascination with methods of photomechanical reproduction in the late 19th century.’

To interrogate the complexities of authorship and intentionally challenge the mythology of artistic genius, Jackson developed a semi-autonomous laser process to bring an otherworldly quality to his paintings. ‘I developed a reductive painting process using my laser that works in conjunction with bitmap files taken from CMYK colour separations. These files are also tonal so they allow the laser to etch the image on both high and low relief,’ he reveals. ‘This has been a long time in the making. The end result does not present itself immediately, which I think makes it successful so that one is just confronted with the image rather than the complexity of the process.’

Jackson’s combination of physical and digital modes of making is at the forefront of the new works. ‘These always have had to work in concert with one another. I strangely think in reverse, relative to the industries that I traverse with my work,’ he says. ‘In design, I work from the physical until it feels and looks right and then transcribe it digitally to produce the prototype. When it comes to art, I just try to be as present as I can in my daily life and when form, colour, material, and process come together, the digital aspect becomes how to keep all of the things I am thinking about in registration. I want digital and analogue to fit together perfectly so that we can regain our hands, which have seemed to atrophy.’

It has notably been a decade since Jackson’s last solo exhibition in New York. ‘My show in 2013 was hard and I took on too much in youthful naivety, Jackson reflects. ‘In the time since, I went and lived in Wyoming, moved studios several times and finally the pandemic all piled up to take up ten years. I have been showing consistently outside the US but for a number of reasons, not in New York City. I am older and have more faith in tomorrow. I will never know it all, but I know some, and what I know is fun and exciting and that is good enough. Accepting this has taken ten years.’

Matthew Day Jackson, 'Against Nature', until 1 July 2023, Pace Gallery, New York. pacegallery.com