Matthew Choberka, “Happy Trails,” acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 58×70 in.

It’s just all so much — the contrasting palettes and swirling forms, the scraped, stained and splattered paint, the disembodied heads and piercing shafts of color. It’s the maximalist expressionism of Matthew Choberka, this month at ‘A’ Gallery.

The Weber State University professor has always practiced a style of excess, loading up his paintings with expressive brushwork and indeterminate, jostling forms. He’s a painter freed from the notion that art history has a determined, progressive trajectory, one who revels in dipping his brush into the grab bag of 20th-century painting. You’ll find passages of Bacon, Hockney and Frankenthaler mashed up against the artists of CoBrA and Die Brücke. All in one painting. 

All Smiles features 17 paintings, ranging in size from 20×24 in. to 6×7 ft.. Most have been packed into the central space of the gallery, so each painting’s busy, chaotic surface competes with that of its neighbors. They all could use more room to breathe, though a curator might argue the whole is intended to mimic the individual. Any disadvantage in space is compensated by light, which is soft and indirect, showering down from a high bank of windows, revealing the paintings to be softer and subtler than their digitized reproductions.  

Installation view of “All Smiles” at ‘A’ Gallery

In his statement, Choberka speaks of living in scary times, of “painting monsters” and a world of confusion and uncertainty. So don’t be put off if you have a hard time making sense of what is going on. As the title of one painting has it, “Nothing Can Be Named.” In most, there are forms, or at least heads, of varying proportions. Backgrounds are indeterminate and sometimes compete with foreground. In “Happy Trails,” earthy browns and blues are shot through by bright greens, orange and red. Crudely drawn eyes and a mouth help one swirl of light blue coalesce into a figure; the same can’t be said of small head floating upside down in the left of the canvas. 

Choberka’s figures appear, and disappear, in other works. In “The Gang’s All Here,” they — six or seven of them — mass together in the center of the canvas. The figures are more defined in “Friendly Ghost,” though it’s hard to tell which phantasm is friendly. But Choberka does say, in his statement, that “many of these presences seem lately to hint at a gentler or at least more ambivalent emotional range. They often smile back at me, though about just what I am not sure.” One of the more “resolved” canvases in this series is “Dark Forest,” where a narrative seems to take form. There are two full-bodied figures of similar size in the foreground. One, with his back to the viewer, seems to stomp on the bloodied head of the other, while also approaching two other larger figures – not so much figures, however, as disembodied heads. Are those smiles, or grimaces, on their faces? Are they encouraging, or threatening?

Matthew Choberka, “Dark Forest I,” oil, acrylic, and enamel on canvas, 74×88 in.

On the other side of the figurative spectrum, “Almost Scrovegni” seems completely nonobjective. The title refers to the famous chapel in Padua, Italy, where Giotto created his 14th-century masterpiece. Choberka’s deep, bright blue background captures the color of the chapel’s ceiling, while the multi-hued form at the bottom of the canvas could be the frescoes, all swirled up by some early-era imaging software. The Renaissance masters who followed Giotto would find little to like in Choberka’s overloaded, chaotic paintings. But their Mannerist descendants might have been intrigued, might have recognized their own artistic genes turned centuries later into this chaotic, dreamlike state. 

Is expressionism ready for yet another return? (Or has it always been around and it is our attention that comes and goes?) In the early 20th century, it was a response to feelings of subjective despair and disenchantment. Also a cry for freedom. That cry was kept alive in the CoBrA artists of the ‘50s and ‘60s (Choberka’s spectral forms have something in common with the work of Dutch artist Lucebert). The commercialized glitz of its neo- incarnation was a maximalist reaction to the preceding drabness of minimalism and conceptualism. And Choberka seems to bring both expressionism and maximalism to his All Smiles exhibit. Look around Choberka’s own neighborhood and you get the sense he’s not alone: University of Utah professor Xi Zhang (showing at Modern West and UMOCA this month) is rooted in an early Expressionist vocabulary, owing much to Edvard Munch. Heydar Rasoulpur is in the same family. Less expressionistic, but certainly maximalist, is Jon Erickson, another U professor.  

The paintings in All Smiles are not easy to enjoy. None of your yoga-studio minimalism here. But neither are they likely to tire easily: they’ll make you keep looking long after other works have faded into background. Only time will tell if, in the end, you enjoy them. In the meantime, Choberka has painted plenty to haunt your mind.

Installation view of All Smiles with, from left to right, “Mindful,” “Friendly Ghost,” and “Parental Figure”

Matthew Choberka: All Smiles, ‘A’ Gallery, Salt Lake City, through Sep. 2. Artist reception, Friday, Aug. 18, 6-9 pm.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.