For years, artist Bernard Mattox audited philosophy and theology classes through the Seminary College at St. Joseph Abbey, located just down the road from his wooded home and studio north of Covington.
“I had a friend who introduced me to the fact that the Abbey is a college for seminarians and that you could audit a class and sit in with them and have Ph.D.s in philosophy teaching you,” Mattox said. “You just paid for the textbooks and got use of the library. It was wonderful.”
The lessons learned in those classes became part of the rich tapestry of inspiration from which Mattox has created his signature artwork. During his nearly 50-year career, he has mined his studies, dreams, memories, thoughts, and associations from his subconscious to create both large-scale and tabletop ceramic sculpture, as well as richly detailed mixed media with oil paintings on wood panels.
“Everything influences my work. There are so many channels that go through me when I’m working,” Mattox said. “It’s never direct. I start off from scratch, and I don’t preplan my work at all. I just let it evolve: one thing leading to another.”
His pieces are not titled individually but rather as bodies of work, and they contain hundreds of pictorial elements: plant forms, symbols from his Catholic upbringing, human figures, architectural shapes, emblems of his sculptural work and more.
Some paintings have richly colorful palettes that often connect the images. Others feature more graphic elements on white backgrounds or strong black lines that frame the drawn details.
“I have formed a vocabulary of images that I arrange and rearrange and connect to different things,” said Mattox, who works every day on his paintings and ceramic sculptures in the studio he built underneath his home.
“He never stops,” said Danny Saladino, owner of Saladino Gallery. Mattox is represented by the Covington gallery, as well as LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans and Hooks-Epstein Galleries in Houston.
Mattox’s connection to Covington began in childhood when his family moved from New Orleans to a house on the Bogue Falaya River, yet they returned to the city following his father’s sudden passing when Mattox was just 14 years old.
Mattox first studied anthropology at Tulane University but abandoned his pursuit of the degree after he fell in love with the potter’s wheel in an elective ceramics class at Loyola University in 1975. He has bachelor's and master’s in fine arts degrees from the University of Southwestern Louisiana and Tulane University, respectively. Once an art professor at Tulane and Xavier universities, Mattox moved back to the northshore in 1990 to create in solitude.
Now, nearly 25 large-scale paintings are on display in Mattox’s newest solo exhibition at The Atrium Gallery at Christwood. Entitled “The Kantian Bridge Works — Chapter 2,” it opens with a reception on July 13 from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.
“This is one of the biggest shows I’ve ever had in terms of the number of paintings because the Atrium is so vast,” Mattox said. There are pieces from several different series, as well as two new works. One spans 8 feet; the other is 5 feet.
The show’s title refers to 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his teachings about the differences between phenomenon, which “is observable sensory information,” Mattox said, and “what he called ‘noumenon,’ which are things that are unknowable to the senses,” he added. “He called it the Kantian Bridge Works, and it was really about perception.
“I had a show years ago called ‘The Kantian Bridge Works’, and I decided to go back and do a second chapter,” Mattox said. “When I’m playing with a serious title, like the ‘Kantian Bridge Works,' I’m lighting it up. I’m playing with being humorous and with things I investigate subconsciously. That’s my playing field.”