The Setting Sun Is Beautiful Because Of All It Makes Us Lose
Tibor de Nagy Gallery
April 24th - June 6, 2026
PRESS RELEASE:
In his most recent paintings of suns, Matthew Weinstein creates phenomena born out of an undifferentiated pool of memory. The titles are place names, yet they are only footholds within the uncertainty of recall. The sun cannot be remembered, because it is pure heat, vitality, and danger. We cannot make it our own. We cannot even look at it. This is its beauty.
Discrete strokes of oil paint form loose horizontal lines that allow the linen and pencil marks to show through. These strokes produce glowing bands of tinted atmosphere and waves of heat. The surfaces can be read as dismantlings of continuous images, or interrupted realizations of them. In the upper center of each painting is a schematized image of the sun composed of diminishing rings of brushstrokes.
The suns are delineated by a circular border of negative space which makes the images flip back and forth between the dream life of memory and the totemic presence of the delineated circle; from intuition to contemplation. The horizontal lines of strokes can be compared to abstract handwriting which form texts that can be felt but not read. Horizon lines in the paintings suggest illusions and endless pursuits.
Our authoritarian mass media thinks for us, but Weinstein’s practice creates openings for self-generated meaning and narrative, as well as material for the consideration of the political, sensorial, and social effects of familiar images and techniques of representation. The queer navigation of personal identity has informed Weinstein’s investigation into the location of the self within a body of work. In these paintings, the self is not an image or a technique. Instead it is the imminence of meaning and being that exists within the ever shifting tones of the sky.
One of the most insidious effects of totalitarianism is the exteriorization and stagnation of our inner lives, and its transformation of our inner lives into propaganda and pure reactivity. As it is with Artaud, we need the sun to continually incinerate repressive forces as it sets, and to turn new and vital ways of being into possibilities as it rises. This is the beauty of loss.
CATALOGUE ESSAY:
New York
"This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose."
-Antonin Artaud
As a consequence of her illness, my sister’s memory began to leave her. She also became progressively unable to express herself. I visited her fairly regularly at her nursing home in Manhattan. Then I went away on a trip. When I came back, she introduced herself to me and she shook my hand. She no longer knew exactly who I was.
I did not like shaking hands as a child. The act seemed unnatural. The squeeze was odd. Now I do it because I don’t want to offend people. But the reciprocity of regard between my sister and I during this adult handshake was vivid for me because it was a moment of contact during a time when language and recognition no longer functioned between us. For this brief moment, I got to see my sister as others saw her. She was open and polite. She was a person people liked. She was still herself, but not herself for me.
2
I am pushing my sister in her wheelchair up Riverside Drive towards the rounded Greek temple that is the Soldiers’ And Sailors’ Monument at 86th Street. The cadmium yellow autumn sun is making silhouettes of the upper branches of the trees in Riverside Park below us. I turn my sister towards this view and I say, ‘isn’t that beautiful.’ She says, ‘yes.’
I will never know if she could focus on what I was calling her attention to. I will never know if her vanishing sense of specificity allowed her a broader sense of the moment. Perhaps her mind was forming branches of silhouetted memory, and these branches were forming other branches, and these were forming others.
3
Where and when did I experience this light, this temperature, these smells, this food, and these people? Unlocatable memories make me experience a sensation of falling into loneliness until a location presents itself, and like a false friend this location accompanies me to the remembered place which was most likely not a singular place at all. I decided that nothing more pictorial than what could be evoked by a compass and a ruler would be used to draw out these paintings of memory and dislocation. The ruler created a horizon. A vanishing point. Imminence. A divider. A mirage. A thing we can chase like memories, but only to the limits of our obsessions. The compass created a sun. A moon. An electric light in a snowstorm. The center of a galaxy. A stoppage. A ghost in a mirror. I wanted to make phenomena, not to paint them. I gave myself a lot of time to slowly build these paintings. When I finished a few, I hung a small pastel colored blue and pink one with a glowing yellow circle in my sister’s room. I hoped it would allow her to travel. She blew it a kiss.
4
There is no other place that I would have chosen to spend the Covid lockdown in than in Brooklyn. ‘What will the future be?’ I thought as I looked out of my windows at partially empty streets. Will there be a future, or have we hit pause forever? But New York reminded me that it is a great and mighty city full of great and mighty people who form great and mighty communities. And what place facilitates the dreams of other places better than New York because its urban density makes us look towards the only expanse of space available to us; the sky. And then the sky over this place. And the sky over that place.
5
The sun bleaches memory. The summer sun in New York sticks to my skin in memories that will not solidify, but I know it urged me to stay out until late in the evening. I remember working as a window dresser in a department store. It was summer. I recall heat and white brightness more than the people and the work. The sun blazed into the sweaty boxes of light we were working within. New Yorkers and tourists, who were glancing at us from the street, may have recognized us as beings bound into servitude by the rules of perspective or lit up like specimens in a diorama at the museum of natural history with the label, ‘Creative Professionals.’
6
A sunset wrings the murky and tidal waters out of the fabric of memory. The specificity of recall shatters in the presence of their incomprehensibility. A sunrise breaks the loneliness of being awake in the dark. Its effects are tied to what it is slowly revealing. A sunshower is a liminal state of weather that I have always found unsettling. I am not alone in this. The Dutch word for it translates into ‘the devil’s fair.’ A Japanese word for it translates into ‘fox’s wedding,’ which sounds unsettling if you are not a fox. The rainbow at the end of a sunshower is beautiful but, in relation to the trickster, sarcastic.
7
The nursing home in which my sister lived was on the Upper West Side. Her room was high up and she had a good view of the Hudson River. Her final months were summer months and I could see the punishing sun having its way with New York and New Jersey while the river sparkled between them like the free zone between the two parallel lengths of The Berlin Wall.
The most iconic views of New York are views from Brooklyn and Queens because instead of looking at New Jersey we get to look at the Manhattan skyline. I imagine a giant mirror suddenly appearing that allows Manhattan to see itself as it appears to others. It would create an effect comparable to instances when I think that a mirror is a doorway, and I see someone standing in this doorway who it turns out is actually me. I see myself as a stranger just as my sister saw me during that handshake. I think that if I could extend this mirrored moment I would finally know something about myself.
8
My father died in New York, and the city’s ever regenerating plentitude of life went mute. The oceanic pull of memory flooded into the specificities of my recall of him. I always want things to be more real, more accurate, and more pure than they are. Instead of chasing the vanishing point of recall with evidence, I realized that I already had all the material I needed. For this reason, I dislike spending too much time with photographs. They are tricksters and foxes.They are neither memories nor are they documents. I did not want to view the evolution of my near sighted and style conscious father’s selections of eyeglasses. But I distinctly remember that his eyes became brighter when he took his glasses off, much in the way I remember his eyes looking when I stared into them at the moment he died, when it seemed like he was taking account of each of us with his last glint of the blue sea until, perhaps, everything became a horizon. I like to think of a painting of mine winking out a morse code of who I am for hundreds of years, like the sun when it blinks its eye open in the morning and down in the evening.
Matthew Weinstein
Brooklyn, NY. Winter. 2026.
