SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Dolby Chadwick Gallery is presenting Labyrinths, an exhibition of new work by Matt Gonzalez.

The idea of the labyrinth looms large in our collective imagination, reaching all the way back to the ancient story of Theseus slaying the Minotaur, where he then finds his way out by following yarn that he unraveled while descending into its depths. In Matt Gonzalez’s recent collage works, we return with fresh eyes to the idea of the labyrinth. These works are by no means large, but they do invite us to remember that amazing things can often come in small packages, just as they also suggest that the viewer can play the role of Theseus seeking a simultaneous entrance into and escape from their layered complexity. Is there a Minotaur lurking somewhere within them? Or maybe, in our own age of proliferating complexity, it is the labyrinth itself that has become the new Minotaur. This later view echoes Franz Kafka’s famous Parable of the Law, where an aspirant’s quest for justice is frustrated by a host of gatekeepers deflecting and forestalling his appeal to its righteous exercise. This seems to square with Gonzalez’s longtime career as a political activist and public defender. Like Theseus and like Kafka’s unnamed aspirant, he has entered the jurisprudential maze on many occasions, usually returning with a positive outcome.

Gonzalez’s collage works also address the idea of the labyrinth by shifting back and forth between graphic organization and schematic spatial representations, always organized on a perpendicular grid, each providing visual ballast for the other as if they were two sides of a singular coin. They remind us that first step for escaping any labyrinth is by understanding how it’s frustrating confines are governed by structural rules requiring patient study in advance of any escape. In all cases, the first rule for finding one’s way out of any maze is to recognize that is designed as such to confine, hinder or distract all movement within it. Only then can the necessary exit be found.

The majority of Gonzalez’s new works are monochrome or almost so, while a few venture into the realm of extremely syncopated polychrome. Either way, there is almost no recourse to the use of paint, although in a few cases dark color is applied with a brayer only to be later removed so to sharpen the drop shadows lurking at the bottom of slightly protruding shapes. What color there is comes from the found materials that Gonzalez gleans from everyday encounters with the urban environment, itself a kind of labyrinth. Many of those materials have reflective properties that shimmer and shine like Byzantine mosaics. In almost all cases, Gonzalez repurposes colorful fragments of commercial packaging rescued from landfill oblivion. These are stripped down to form intricate graphic shapes made more so by the fact that he carefully removes the adjacent typographic elements, thereby turning negative space forms into positive shapes that are elaborate and idiosyncratic. This is a time-consuming and meticulous process, as is the affixing of those cut-out shapes in distinct, overlapping layers upon their support surfaces. His preferred adhesive for accomplishing this is polyvinyl acetate, which also provides a permanent seal.

Is it by accident that the elaborate shape configurations in Gonzalez’s college works resemble the characters of an ancient cuneiform lost to time? Most likely yes, but that does not mean that we can’t envision these works as singular pages from an illuminated manuscript chronicling some obscure form of esoteric wisdom otherwise lost to time. The fact that they are formed from several layers makes them comparable to the kind of diachronic maps that archeologists use to examine, parse and reimagine the different layers of ancient cities that have been lost to time. Indeed, these works invoke a kind of archeological romance having to do with engaging the mystery of the world to gain a newly necessary knowledge of lost magic.

Matt Gonzalez was born in 1965 in McAllen, Texas. He earned a BA from Columbia University and a JD from Stanford Law School. In addition to a practicing artist, Gonzalez is Chief Attorney at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. His art can be found in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. This will be his fourth solo show with the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.