Christopher Howard blogs about Matthew Miller: Can't You See It: I am One recently on view at Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia, New York.

Howard, who attended Miller's gallery talk, notes: "while looking closely at [Untitled, 2014], I noticed that the treatment of the chest is gauzy, while the hand and face are more naturalistically detailed. The block of wood is somewhere in between. The levels of verisimilitude vary and therefore are not evenly distributed in a composition, which is perhaps what Miller meant by his self-reflexive approach to self-portraiture… One intriguing statement [Miller] made concerned the sturdy black background in most of his works, an opaque but reflective darkness that he identified as theoretical, metaphorical, and symbolic space. That black background fluctuates between an airless space to infinite depth, introducing substantial mystery into his work and raising a screen onto which a viewer’s ideas can be projected."