Nearing Each Other: Matthew Constant

Nearing Each Other, the 89th installment in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum Series, invites us to reimagine our own complex connections to place as a site of unfolding relationships. In this exhibition, place may be an environment, a material experience, or a memory to suggest notions of belonging and transformation.

Since 2021, Matthew Constant has been routinely drawing the rising and setting sun across our local landscape. His collection of over 80 watercolor drawings establishes a personal record of ephemeral moments, marked by the colorful play of light and fleeting sensation of time. Aureolin (2021– 2024) presents a selection of drawings that explores abstractions of sunlight and Constant’s interest in making each setting uniquely tangible through color, thickness, and agitation from his application of pigment. The physical expression of light inspires the title for this presentation—aureolin is a cool-toned, luminous yellow pigment used to depict sunlight in paintings and watercolors beginning in the mid19th century. The artist describes that while the sun is difficult to observe directly for most of the day, as it rises and sets, it takes on a novel and generous transience that begs for personal interpretation and reflection.