Terra Firmament, Part 2: Matt Rebholz and Jana Swec

The title is a portmanteau of the Latin terra firma, meaning solid earth, and the English firmament, referring to the vault of the heavens.

The artists channel their personal histories into emotionally charged landscapes, steeped in narrative and individual mythology. Both create contemporary paintings that meditate on the liminal spaces between Earth and Sky, Mind and Body.

Matt Rebholz

The spaces depicted in Matt Rebholz’s landscape paintings are informed by film stills from Western, Fantasy, and Science Fiction films. These environments have been denuded of all evidence of life, leaving rocky and alien landscapes rendered in an electrified, saturated palette, inviting the viewer to explore and occupy them while meditating on the cinematic mythologies encoded within.

Rebholz engages with film as a coping strategy to manage a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder. Genre movies like those referenced in the paintings represent a comfortable space of retreat and an emotional scaffold in times of crisis. Like bipolar disorder itself, the landscapes that have been built around these films are simultaneously lonesome and populous, quiet and loud, barren and fertile.

www.mattrebholz.com

Jana Swec

Drawing from nature and primary elements of the universe, Jana Swec’s unique approach to painting is characterized as a blending of the abstract with formal depictions of the natural world. Themes that motivate her works often deal with relationship energetics, whether interpersonal or societal. Her imagination is inspired in deeply feeling the dynamics of relating and observing the vastness of a collective mind.

Swec creates her paintings as a way of processing events around her. Each piece begins using color as a language for emotions. From there the artwork acts as an internal conversation, often changing direction several times while working through understanding the conflict at hand. Creating atmospheres that emerge while witnessing previous ones evaporate is a healing act for Swec. These pieces reflect how life can surprise and force one to change and pivot, sometimes uncomfortably, but unavoidably with a new perspective.

https://www.janaswec.art/