Slightly over a decade in the past, the actor Matt Dillon was at a good friend’s house when he began doodling with crayons disregarded for kids. Soon, his kitchen counter had change into a workshop. By 2016, he was renting a studio to color in. Despite having little formal coaching himself, Dillon grew up in an inventive household (his father and grandmother had been portrait painters and his great-uncle created Flash Gordon) and inherited a love for image-making.
Dillon’s model that has emerged in a regular clip of gallery exhibitions in recent times is spontaneous, textured, and gestural. He paints daring, flat works marked with mercurial figures, recurring symbols, and unexplained phrases. When on set and away from the studio, Dillon makes do with what’s at hand, lathering acrylic on unfastened paper and repurposed notebooks. The observe is on present in his first solo present at The Journal Gallery in New York, “Porto Novo to Abomey,” which opens April 24.
Installation view of “Porto Novo to Abomey.” Photo: courtesy The Journal Gallery/Guang Xu.
The sequence of work was born whereas Dillon was in Senegal for Claire Denis’s The Fence (2025) during which he performed Horn, an embattled American who’s overseeing a controversial development undertaking in an unnamed West African nation. After filming, he travelled by way of Benin encountering textiles, architectures, landscapes, and people who proved wealthy supply materials. The present’s title traces the 100-mile journey inland from the nation’s modern-day capital to the middle of the Kingdom of Dahomey. Back in New York, he scrawled the place names on a piece of black Masonite, which has been put in within the gallery’s window.
Matt Dillon, Porto Novo to Abomey (2026). Photo courtesy the artist and The Journal Gallery.
“It’s not meant to be a literal description of the work or place, but rather the feeling behind the work,” the gallery’s co-founder, Michael Nevin, mentioned over e mail.
That feeling is one among lingering photos being flattened and forged loosely in paint. An ungainly 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 pink background. One work facilities on voodoo, which partly originated within the Kingdom of Dahomey, layering masks and instruments on lined notepad paper.
Another two are named Coastal Landscape: the primary provides a block of black for sea and sand with tree branches hanging like tooth, whereas the second shapes an uneasy and haggard determine. Intentional or in any other case, it’s laborious not to think about the untold thousands and thousands who departed the shoreline enslaved.
Matt Dillon, Untitled (2025). Photo courtesy of The Journal Gallery.
Previously, Dillon’s relationship to this a part of the world has largely come by way of music. He’s studied rumba and guaguancó, boasts a huge assortment of Afro-Cuban data, and made El Gran Fellove (2020), a documentary about Francisco Fellove, a pioneer who mixed Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz within the Fifties. Nevin mentioned this background finally impressed and guided Dillon’s road-trip by way of Benin.
“Matt is always drawing, collaging, collecting, writing on the road. He will pick up found textbooks or old newspapers to be repurposed as sketchbooks,” Julia Dippelhofer, the gallery’s different co-founder mentioned. “He is like a sponge and a great storyteller.”
“Matt Dillon: Porto Novo to Abomey” is on view at The Journal Gallery, 45 White Street, New York, April 24–May 23.
