“In his most recent body of work, Matt Arbuckle has gone beyond evoking the geological and begun employing actual marble in his work, interposing real slabs alongside painted panels echoing their clouds and veins.Having once worked as a paint finisher, using feathers and badger hair brushes to mimic those imperfections that make marble so diverse and desirable, Arbuckle could choose to continue the stone, to render the painted surface indiscernible from the patterns made as limestone metamorphosed into marble. Instead, he chooses to respond to the marble through a process not entirely dissimilar to the frottage he has employed in his works for years, although rather than rubbing over a surface to create a ghostly imprint of the thing, Arbuckle makes alongside the stone, responding to the specificity of its veins and hues…”

Excerpt from Born and Found, Lucinda Bennett, 2024