Interviewing Matt Greene was a bit like conversing with someone standing behind a curtain. Not that he’s weird like that, but I’ve never met him in person. I walked through his recent show here at Peres Projects Berlin trying to suss him out, and then the interview was by email; me in Berlin, he in Los Angeles.

In the gallery, and during our correspondence, I was trying to figure out where the layers of porn, mushrooms, flora and blackness were taking me. It wasn’t clear if it was morbidity or abundance with the upper hand. The paintings, which always seem to tangle in the middle, jungled up even the lofty spaciousness of the Peres gallery. Streams of blackness flowed from the sexes of naked women, and I couldn’t decide if that was really something primordial, or somehow an expression of the horror of death. I currently have one theory that charms me: I think the mushrooms that adorn ‘For the Eyes of our Fathers’, pressing out from the rest of the visual field, are pregnant.

But a painting is ruined by the sentences describing it. Beyond imagery, the work shows a view of the world pointed somewhere above and beyond the normal anthropocentric frame. Something like all life and all death and all its in-betweens. This viewpoint itself, a sacred act of transgression.