What we're up to

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MARCH – Visit to the studios of Matthan Cowart and Bill Sabatini – Albuquerque

Visit to Matthan Cowart’s studio

From Matthan: “Painting grounds and animates my practice - its material characteristics, historical prevalence, and spiritual capacity craft a vessel for traversing a distinctly promiscuous and interdisciplinary approach to art making, from sculpture to video. My philosophical and material interests converge around questions of labor, legibility, violence, seduction, symbolism, and altered states of being in the context of desert life. Through DIY monasticism and subculture sensibilities, my practice involves a perpetual enfolding of the corporeal and conceptual edges of transcendent experience.

For me, the transcendent is inextricably entwined with the somatic tension between abjection and seduction. The inherent instability of paint as a physical material mirrors the inner and outer experience of the body itself, and I indulge in the full range of that physicality through spraying, dripping, scrapping, layering, and carefully rendering forms. In further reflection of our physical existence, my pieces have things buried under the surface, adornments of spikes and beads, cast-off and reconstituted remnants, and of course the ghosts of ideas and past lives haunting its presence.”

WEBSITE: matthancowart.com/works

Visit to Bill Sabatini’s studio

From Bill: “I’m an abstract painter working in Albuquerque, New Mexico where I translate the sensations of landscape into color, texture, and gesture. My forty years as an architect continue to shape my approach, giving me a strong sense of spatial balance and material presence, even as my studio practice embraces greater spontaneity.

Rather than depict a specific place, I aim to capture the experience of place—how color can feel like temperature, how texture suggests terrain, how lines carry motion. Subtle graphite lines and proportional instincts echo my architectural past, but they serve only as a framework for a more intuitive, expressive process.

Color is essential to my work. While the earthy tones of the desert remain an anchor, I also use vivid magentas, greens, blues, and warm oranges and golds to create contrast and emotional energy. My surfaces develop through layered processes—scraping, building, washing, and embedding—leaving visible histories that invite slow, attentive looking.

What I hope to convey is the feeling of standing in the desert: its vastness, warmth, and quiet intensity. My work seeks to offer viewers a moment of grounded clarity and the pleasure of deep visual exploration.”

WEBSITE: www.billsabatini.com

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