A bit of over a decade in the past, the actor Matt Dillon was once at a chum’s rental when he began doodling with crayons unnoticed for youngsters. Quickly, his kitchen counter had change into a workshop. Via 2016, he was once renting a studio to color in. Regardless of having little formal coaching himself, Dillon grew up in a creative circle of relatives (his father and grandmother have been portrait painters and his great-uncle created Flash Gordon) and inherited a love for image-making.
Dillon’s taste that has emerged in a gradual clip of gallery exhibitions in recent times is spontaneous, textured, and gestural. He paints daring, flat works marked with mercurial figures, ordinary symbols, and unexplained phrases. When on set and clear of the studio, Dillon makes do with what’s to hand, lathering acrylic on free paper and repurposed notebooks. The follow is on display in his first solo display at The Magazine Gallery in New York, “Porto Novo to Abomey,” which opens April 24.
Set up view of “Porto Novo to Abomey.” Photograph: courtesy The Magazine Gallery/Guang Xu.
The collection of artwork was once born whilst Dillon was once in Senegal for Claire Denis’s The Fence (2025) by which he performed Horn, an embattled American who’s overseeing a arguable building challenge in an unnamed West African nation. After filming, he travelled via Benin encountering textiles, architectures, landscapes, and folks that proved wealthy supply subject material. The display’s identify lines the 100-mile adventure inland from the rustic’s modern day capital to the middle of the Kingdom of Dahomey. Again in New York, he scrawled where names on a work of black Masonite, which has been put in within the gallery’s window.
Matt Dillon, Porto Novo to Abomey (2026). Photograph courtesy the artist and The Magazine Gallery.
“It’s now not intended to be a literal description of the paintings or position, however somewhat the sensation in the back of the paintings,” the gallery’s co-founder, Michael Nevin, stated over e-mail.
That feeling is one among lingering photographs being flattened and solid loosely in paint. A clumsy cat in flight rendered in stark black define, a stack of luminous orange cinderblocks in opposition to a wall, the ocean in inexperienced and laid on a weathered red background. One paintings facilities on voodoo, which in part originated within the Kingdom of Dahomey, layering masks and equipment on coated notepad paper.
Some other two are named Coastal Panorama: the primary provides a block of black for sea and sand with tree branches placing like tooth, whilst the second one shapes an uneasy and haggard determine. Intentional or another way, it’s arduous now not to think about the untold tens of millions who departed the sea coast enslaved.
Matt Dillon, Untitled (2025). Photograph courtesy of The Magazine Gallery.
Up to now, Dillon’s dating to this a part of the arena has in large part come via song. He’s studied rumba and guaguancó, boasts an unlimited choice of Afro-Cuban information, and made El Gran Fellove (2020), a documentary about Francisco Fellove, a pioneer who mixed Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz within the Nineteen Fifties. Nevin stated this background in the long run impressed and guided Dillon’s road-trip via Benin.
“Matt is all the time drawing, collaging, accumulating, writing at the avenue. He’s going to select up discovered textbooks or outdated newspapers to be repurposed as sketchbooks,” Julia Dippelhofer, the gallery’s different co-founder stated. “He is sort of a sponge and an excellent storyteller.”
“Matt Dillon: Porto Novo to Abomey” is on view at The Magazine Gallery, 45 White Side road, New York, April 24–Might 23.