The title, NYC Man, bears some reference to anonymity, permitting us to envision the persona of an everyman from the city through the various artworks. It could however also be ambiguously expressive, insomuch that it is idiomatically affirming a quality of being here.

These paintings may present a revelrous or Gatsbyian ideal of New York life. The blurred renderings of alcohol seem to suggest that something in the room is stuck in time. Sweet Silver (2020) depicts a sipped stein and cocktail moving in slow motion. Elsewhere in this exhibition, wobbly pints, martinis, and tipped over bottles are arranged across fullscreen sprawls of snakeskin and zebra hide. Intoxication is the most pronounced motif. Yet the shaking drinks paired with the arresting presence of animal textures provide each work with highly alert, if not alarming, overtones. The stripes and scales evoke a function more existential than the inanimateness of a background or quantifiability of a pattern. The meticulous designation of each compositional component slithers into consciousness from the periphery.

Through NYC Man Matranga continues to create philosophical paintings, ever-enhancing in complexity. Her elucidation of subjectivity provides us with instantaneously characteristic ways to understand each artwork, and perhaps from there we are led to further, more personal reflections upon our own relationships with drinking.

Marc Matchak, 2022