Matt Dillon’s New Paintings Trace a Journey Across West Africa

Somewhat over a decade in the past, the actor Matt Dillon was at a good friend’s condominium when he began doodling with crayons disregarded for kids. Soon, his kitchen counter had grow to be a workshop. By 2016, he was renting a studio to color in. Despite having little formal coaching himself, Dillon grew up in a creative household (his father and grandmother have been painter portraits 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 lately 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 free paper and repurposed notebooks. The follow is on present in his first solo present at The Journal Gallery in New York, “Porto Novo to Abomey,” which opens April 24.

The collection of work was born whereas Dillon was in Senegal for Claire Denis‘s The Fence (2025) through which he performed Horn, an embattled American who’s overseeing a controversial building challenge in an unnamed West African nation. After filming, he traveled by Benin encountering textiles, architectures, landscapes, and people who supplied 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, I’ve 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 of 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 Nevinmentioned over electronic mail.

That feeling is considered one of lingering pictures being flattened and solid 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 presents a block of black for sea and sand with tree branches hanging like enamel, whereas the second shapes an uneasy and haggard determine. Intentional or in any other case, it is exhausting not to consider the untold tens of millions 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 music. He’s studied rumba and guaguancó, boasts a huge assortment of Afro-Cuban data, and made The Great Fellove (2020), a documentary about Francisco Fellovea pioneer who mixed Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz within the Nineteen Fifties. Nevin mentioned this background in the end impressed and guided Dillon’s road-trip by Benin.

“Matt is always drawing, collating, collecting, writing on the road. He will pick up found textbooks or old newspapers to be repurposed as sketchbooks,” Julia Dippelhoferthe 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.