Collages of ancient images evoke the everlasting

Bottom line: Matthew Craven’s solo show is a fugue on the ancient, the timeless and the touch of the artist’s hand in the age of the digital.

At first glance New York-based artist Matthew Craven’s images look to be straightforward prints, with their repeated images and clean, symmetrical layouts.

But if a print is all about multiplicity and immediacy, Craven’s artworks are about the singular and eternal. Craven, in his more labor-intensive work, is instead focused on objects carved from stone and clay that stand the test of time. The artist’s solo show “Arrangement” — his first at Midtown’s Get This! Gallery — is relentlessly obsessed with images of the ancient: ancient Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, Assyrian, Egyptian and African statuary, artworks and architecture. But the eternal landscape also occasionally factors into this artwork: the star-filled sky above, and a landscape of untouched mountains and valleys also depicted in his collages.

Going against the trend to the digital and the Photoshopped, Craven is working in a very lo-fi mode, using images from vintage textbooks and cutting and arranging them like a newspaper layout artist circa 1980 or a kid with a glue stick and construction paper prepping for the science fair. In an age when so much can be digitally manipulated, it is a pleasure in its own right to see work that relies so heavily on a more pared down bag of tricks. With his reliance on old paper stock, faded colors and textbook imagery, there is something instantly familiar about Craven’s work. You’d swear even the scent of old paper is in the air with its comforting, nostalgic suggestion of libraries and school days. There is something tender and thoughtful in Craven’s reverence — even when it cheekily manifests itself in stone figures with blazing yellow eyes like some Sixties monster movie — for the past seen in both his technique and subject matter.

In his collage on paper “headsss,” Craven arranges 20 found images of an ancient stone head into a grid on paper. Though the images suggest repetition via photocopier or digital process, in fact Craven’s image of that ancient sculpture is pulled from the same book of which the artist has managed to locate 20 copies. Equally obsessive are the three “arrangement(s)” collages in the show, which feature dozens of tiny black and white images of ancient architecture, marble busts and fertility figures, mixed in with the odd modernist sculpture. These elaborate collages, filled with objects to keep your eye busy, continue an idea of culture and art objects as a timeless language stretching over the centuries.

Craven often combines these found images with his ink drawings with their elaborate patterns used as backgrounds or as another layer in his works. In the collage piece “valley(s)” a bronze head is juxtaposed against an obsessively rendered black and white pattern also inspired by ancient designs. Other works, like “totem (ARRANGEMENT)” are composed entirely of ink on paper drawings. Such detailed, obsessive mark-making often bears a resemblance to another Get This! Gallery artist, Andy Moon Wilson, who also creates obsessive, doodle-like drawings in ink.

Craven’s work is visually compelling in its own right, but also speaks to a long tradition of more contemporary artworks and artists like Picasso or Chirico, or Atlanta’s own Radcliffe Bailey, who have found inspiration in ancient culture. While “Arrangement” evokes that powerful sense of eternal creativity, the show can also feel a little one-note and free of the sense of play and humor that have characterized Craven’s other work.