Nathaniel Matthews
This Loneliness

June 12 – July 12, 2025
48 Ludlow Street, NYC

Entrance is pleased to present This Loneliness, a solo exhibition by Nathaniel Matthews. Rooted in the theatrics of Vaudeville, tiki bars, and condensed milk, the exhibition draws these seemingly disparate themes together through the artist’s ongoing examination of the promise of escape. A single central painting, isolated in the basement-level gallery and staged like a theatrical set, anchors the installation. Surrounding works in the ground floor gallery function as residual fragments, props, or epilogues.

Matthews recognized an emotional logic emerging in these subjects, one the artist has mapped: beginning with performance, moving through the promise of escape, then into the vacancy of unfulfilled fantasy, followed by a deeper depravity, and ultimately, concluding in loneliness. He treats these subjects as both personal and performative, engaging not as a cultural critic, but as a participant in a ritual of observation and reenactment—a gesture flirting between parody and earnestness. Acting as witness to what the artist defines as “sinister”, both in the subject matters’ shared problematic history and by the deception of undelivered satisfaction.

Nostalgic for a bygone era that never was. Striving for some kind of satisfaction that perpetually is out of reach. Carrot on a string. Is fantasy better than reality? Are the colors of the real world only really real when you view them on the screen?

- Nathaniel Matthews

In his central painting, a can of Carnation condensed milk is situated in the center of a theatrical composition, flanked by ghostlike entertainers and artificial tropical scenery. An altar to aesthetic, is this a satire of kitsch or a sincere staging? Across the exhibition, Matthews’s material approach mirrors his conceptual stance: working in multiple techniques, he allows each subject to dictate its form, using whatever means best preserves or degrades the content as intended. Whether clear or obscured, it aims to leave an impression over identification, prioritizing a feeling more than a fact.

One of the exhibition’s origins was Matthews’ solo performance of taking a bus from his current residence in Brooklyn to his hometown borough of Staten Island, where he visited a tiki bar called ‘Jade Island’ located in a strip mall. This Loneliness becomes not just a portrait of constructed cultural imagery, but also of the artist’s own image-making: his role as performer, consumer, voyeur, and stand-in.

Another was an encounter with a Brazilian drink called Swiss lemonade, made with limes and condensed milk, named for the European milkmaid on a Nestlé label. This slippage between source and surface became a larger inquiry into how fantasy travels—how it is marketed, consumed, and believed. Matthews’s interest is not in correcting this mythology, but in observing how it adheres, how it performs, and how it fails. This Loneliness isn’t positioned as critique or nostalgia, but an index of personal entanglements within. Matthews does not aim to resolve his contradictions, but to stage them with a distance that echoes the viewer’s own.

His work draws no moral conclusion, only perhaps a mood: Loneliness, though not the motivation behind the work, is its ultimate conclusion. Matthews notes how the illusion of connection and undelivered promise can intensify the experience of isolation. The artist’s own positioning within the work remains slippery: as both subject and observer, his stance is one of curiosity and distance, simultaneously inside the scene and outside, peering from behind Jade Island’s drop ceilings.

Nathaniel Matthews (b. 1991, Staten Island, NY) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His practice is informed by a history in self-publishing and sub-cultures, and is often led by research and reference. Much of his work centers around themes of iconography and idolatry, image manipulation and re-appropriation, class, ritual, fantasy, parody, and peripheral recollection.

His past exhibitions include ‘Hard Mod Magazine’ at Printed Matter NYC 2024, ‘Ready For a Night On The Town In My Tuxedo’, 155 Bay Ridge Ave., NY 2021, ‘Original Music Op.1 listening demonstration’, Entrance NYC, 2019, “Me With Cops installation”, MoMA, 2018.

For inquiries, email info@entrance.nyc