SANTA FE, NM.- Peyton Wright Gallery is presenting an exhibition of drawings by Matthew Pendleton. The exhibition is on view through August 31.

In his inaugural exhibition, Matthew Pendleton challenges judgement; a pencil in his hand becomes a sorcerer’s wand, conjuring a meditation on the first known manual of Japanese gardening, the Sakuteiki (“records of garden-making”) or a never-ending dream-time journal from the Kimberley region of western Australia.

Compellingly precise, ripe with unfolding metaphysical lineage, the visual promise of Matthew Pendleton's work is profound.

Born in 1980 in Woodward Oklahoma, Pendleton grew up around the multidisciplinary practices of his older brothers; and with no formal education in the arts, Pendleton makes his way and defines his process with focus, commitment, and an abundant investment of time.

Matthew Pendleton's work is a labor of solitude and precision. It can best be described as the physical footprint of a "living meditation."

Pendleton was never interested in the rendering of objects using realism. For him, abstraction is the mystery that comes out of his work; he never knows what a piece will be until it is complete.

Spending months, and even years, of focused attention on each piece, each line gives vitality to the work. He begins each piece with a small, abstract shape against a white paper field.

Slowly, laboriously, he begins to outline the shape with spider-web thin lines. Never-touching and carefully drawn, these lines begin to take on a life of their own as the drawing's topography is revealed.

The lines create a visual echo of the central shape, rippling out in all directions to the edge of the paper, reacting and creating tension within and around each other.

Pendleton’s line prevails and unfolds, piquing our device-addled psyches, enjoining us to accompany him across the threshold and through the doorway of perception, the abiding frontispiece of Pendleton’s work.

On display are drawings from 2017 to the present.