Matt Dillon’s first solo show traces a 100-mile route through Benin, turning road notes, textures, and West African symbols into striking contemporary paintings.
For more than a decade, Matt Dillon has been quietly building a parallel life as a painter—starting with crayons on a friend’s counter and evolving into a studio practice that now lands in New York.
The new solo exhibition, “Porto Novo to Abomey,” opens April 24 at The Journal Gallery and turns travel into texture.. Dillon’s route is mapped through a title that points to the roughly 100-mile journey inland from Porto-Novo (modern-day capital) toward the historical center of the Kingdom of Dahomey.. But the show’s power doesn’t come from postcard clarity.. Instead, it’s shaped by a more human impulse: the feeling of images sticking around after the road ends.
Dillon describes his approach through process more than explanation.. The works carry the marks of improvisation—gestural brushwork. flattened forms. recurring symbols. and words that arrive on the page like notes you can’t quite translate later.. He doesn’t treat the studio like a clean-room for perfection.. When he’s traveling or between shoots. he works with whatever is available: acrylic on loose paper. repurposed notebooks. and the kind of quick collecting that makes a sketchbook feel like a diary.
In the gallery, that method shows up as bold, flat compositions anchored by mercurial figures.. Some paintings read like fragments pulled from a longer narrative—an ungainly cat in flight outlined in stark black. luminous orange cinderblocks stacked against a wall. and a sea rendered in green laid over a weathered pink background.. Even when details feel abrupt. the overall rhythm suggests accumulation: a mind turning what it sees into a visual memory that keeps reshaping itself.
A key thread in the exhibition began with Dillon’s time in Senegal for Claire Denis’s “The Fence” (2025). where he played Horn. an American overseeing a controversial construction project in an unnamed West African setting.. After filming. Dillon moved through Benin. collecting textures and imagery from textiles. architecture. landscapes. and people—material that became the show’s raw vocabulary.. Misryoum can’t see the road itself. but the paintings capture the aftertaste of it: flattened scenes. layered marks. and symbols that feel both specific and unresolved.
One work centers on voodoo—part of a wider cultural history with origins connected to the Kingdom of Dahomey.. Here, the paint gathers around mask-like shapes and ritual tools, layered over lined notepad paper.. It’s a compelling choice of surface. because it turns spiritual imagery into something drawn in the margins of daily life. not displayed at a distance.. Another pair of paintings includes titles that point to coastal experience and inland unease: one. “Coastal Landscape. ” compresses sea and sand into blocks of black while tree branches hang like teeth; another shapes a haggard figure that feels strained at the edges.
That coastal imagery makes it hard to avoid the historical weight behind the region’s shoreline.. Coastal landscapes, especially in contexts tied to Dahomey and the broader Atlantic world, inevitably echo larger histories of forced displacement.. The show doesn’t deliver a lecture. but it places those memories where the eye wants to pause—between what’s rendered and what’s not said.
Dillon’s relationship to this part of the world has also long traveled through sound.. He has studied rumba and guaguancó and built a collection of Afro-Cuban records. and he made “El Gran Fellove” (2020). a documentary about Francisco Fellove. a pioneer who fused Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz in the 1950s.. Misryoum views the exhibition as the visual counterpart to that musical curiosity: a road-trip sensibility that listens for patterns and then translates them into form.. The same sponge-like impulse—collect, repurpose, redraw—becomes painterly structure.
The gallery’s co-founders describe Dillon as someone who keeps working wherever he is.. Found textbooks and old newspapers don’t stay in storage; they become sketchbook material.. Words get scrawled.. Notes become marks.. For viewers, that means “Porto Novo to Abomey” doesn’t feel like a single event captured in paint.. It feels like an ongoing practice of translation—how a traveler tries to hold onto what can’t be neatly explained.
What’s likely to resonate most in this show is the emotional logic of its staging.. The title traces a geographic journey. but the paintings are really about how images linger—how symbols. textures. and fragments keep rewriting themselves in the mind after you’ve moved on.. And as Dillon builds a body of work through gallery exhibitions. the exhibition arrives like proof that a creative life doesn’t have to choose between film sets and studio floors.. Misryoum suspects the real takeaway is that art can travel lightly. absorbing while it moves—and then returning. years later. as something vivid enough to feel like memory.