Eve Matthias, Portraiture, and the Art of Staying with the Human Figure
In the San José City College Art Gallery, a red chair holds its ground.
It is not an emblem in the decorative sense, nor a prop enlisted for symbolism after the fact. It is worn, substantial, and familiar—an object that has lived with its maker for decades. During the fall of 2025, it became the steady anchor of an exhibition by Eve Matthias, the longtime SJCC art professor whose career has been defined by a devotion to the human figure, the ethics of looking, and the slow accumulation of trust between artist and sitter.
Matthias’s exhibition, which ran through December 11, 2025, gathered more than two dozen portraits—full-bodied, frontal, quietly confrontational—each one structured around that same red chair. The works were painted in acrylic, though handled with a density and patience more often associated with oil. The chair repeats. The sitters change. The effect is cumulative rather than declarative, building an architecture of presence that resists narrative closure.
For Matthias, the project began not with an aesthetic problem, but with absence.
“I felt very alone,” she recalled of the early pandemic period, which coincided with her retirement from teaching after more than three decades at San José City College. Teaching, she said, had been “my whole life,” and the sudden loss of daily contact with students, colleagues, models, and friends left a vacuum that was both professional and deeply personal. The portraits that followed were not conceived as a series in the conventional sense. They were acts of return.
When studios reopened, and people cautiously began visiting one another again, Matthias invited friends and colleagues into her home. She asked them to wear whatever they wished. She offered no instructions beyond an invitation to sit. The chair—already a fixture in her studio for nearly twenty years—became the constant. “It was about being an anchor,” she explained. “Something that held the whole group together.”
Photo by Lilith Sanchez
The consistency of the chair does something subtle but decisive. By removing the need for compositional novelty, Matthias places the full burden of difference on the sitter’s posture, weight, and internal state. One figure leans forward, elbows resting loosely on knees. Another folds inward, guarded. Some appear almost to sink into the upholstery, while others perch at its edge, alert. The chair absorbs these variations without commentary. It does not instruct; it receives.
Portraiture, in Matthias’s hands, has never been about likeness alone. Across decades of teaching life drawing and color theory, she developed a sensitivity to the moment when a body stops performing itself and simply occupies space. “There’s a split second,” she once told a class, “when fear drops away.” In the studio, she recognizes that shift instinctively—the subtle release in shoulders, the change in breath, the redistribution of weight. That moment, when vulnerability gives way to presence, is where the work begins.
Photo by Lilith Sanchez
This attentiveness is evident in the paintings themselves. Faces are rendered with care, but not preciousness. Color moves independently of anatomy, clarifying rather than embellishing form. Matthias has long rejected photographic accuracy as an end in itself, favoring what she calls a process of “clarifying distortion”—a means of arriving at psychological truth through chromatic and spatial adjustment rather than replication.
That philosophy owes something to her training, and something to her resistance to it. As a graduate student, Matthias encountered the familiar pressure to abandon figuration in favor of abstraction. She resisted—not out of conservatism, but out of conviction. “I had these skills,” she said plainly. “And I liked using them.” Over time, she learned to think abstractly within representational structure, allowing color blocks, background shapes, and compositional rhythms to carry as much expressive weight as anatomy itself.
The red chair series makes this negotiation visible. If the figures were removed, the paintings would still function—fields of color interlocking with surprising tension. Pillows, shadows, and negative space behave architecturally. The chair is not merely occupied; it organizes the entire pictorial field.
Many of the sitters are women, a choice Matthias made deliberately. “I’m not a feminist,” she said, qualifying the statement almost immediately. “But feminine energy was very important to me. That’s what I missed the most.” The portraits do not flatten that energy into type. Instead, they reveal it as variable, resistant to categorization. Strength and fatigue coexist. Confidence sits beside hesitation. The series refuses to settle on a single emotional register.
Several self-portraits are included, some dating back years before the red chair project. Their presence introduces a temporal elasticity to the exhibition. Viewers are invited to read the work not as a closed chapter, but as a continuum—one life observed across changing conditions, bodies, and identities.
Exhibited at San José City College, the show carried an additional layer of resonance. Mattthias helped design the gallery itself, shaping it as much as a teaching space as an exhibition venue. Seeing her own work installed there, she said, produced a sense of quiet pride—not only in the paintings but in the institutional continuity they represented.
One of her former students, Emanuela Harris-Sintamarian, now occupies her faculty position, a passing of responsibility that mirrors the ethos of the portraits themselves: attention given, then handed forward.
Photo by Lilith Sanchez
Matthias has often described painting as a dialogue mainly conducted in silence. During sittings, conversation flows freely; later, in the studio, it becomes internal. She works quickly—most portraits take a month to six weeks—but not casually. Hundreds of reference photographs are printed and revisited, not for accuracy but for emotional recall. “That’s the information I gather,” she said, “so I can talk with them emotionally while they’re not there.”
What emerges is neither sentimentality nor detachment, but a sustained act of recognition. The paintings do not explain their subjects. They allow them to exist fully, without narrative demand.
In an era when portraiture is often pressed into service as commentary or branding, Mathias’s work insists on a slower economy. It asks what it means simply to sit—to be seen without instruction, without performance, without urgency. The red chair does not promise comfort. It offers steadiness.
By the time the viewer reaches the final works in the gallery, the chair feels almost animate, not as a symbol but as a witness. It has held grief, fatigue, humor, resistance, and trust. It has absorbed the weight of a community returning to itself.
Eve Mathias’s exhibition does not announce a legacy. It inhabits one.
