Matt Dillon’s First Solo Show in New York Draws on Benin, Senegal, and the Kingdom of Dahomey
A film role, a road trip, and a set of paintings now meet inside The Journal Gallery in New York. Matt Dillon’s first solo exhibition there, Porto Novo to Abomey, opens on April 24 and runs through May 23, 2026, presenting works shaped by time he spent in Senegal while filming Claire Denis’s The Fence and by travel through Benin afterward.
The exhibition title refers to the roughly 100-mile inland route from Porto Novo, Benin’s modern-day capital, to Abomey, once the center of the Kingdom of Dahomey. Dillon carried that geography back to New York in a more literal form as well: he wrote the place names on a sheet of black Masonite, now installed in the gallery window.
The paintings themselves translate travel into fragments rather than scenes. An ungainly cat appears in stark black outline. Orange cinderblocks glow against a wall. The sea is rendered in green over a weathered pink ground. In one work, Dillon turns to voodoo, layering masks and tools over lined notepad paper, a gesture that links the exhibition to a spiritual tradition that partly originated in Dahomey.
Other works, including two titled Coastal Landscape, push the imagery toward something more unsettled. One reduces sea and sand to a block of black, with tree branches hanging down like teeth. The other shapes an uneasy, haggard figure. The effect is less documentary than mnemonic: images that seem to have been flattened, carried, and reassembled from memory.
Dillon’s interest in the region did not begin with painting. He has long worked through music, studying rumba and guaguancó and collecting Afro-Cuban records. He also directed El Gran Fellove in 2020, a documentary about Francisco Fellove, the Cuban singer and composer who fused Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz in the 1950s. According to the gallery, that background helped guide Dillon’s journey through Benin and the visual language that emerged from it.
At The Journal Gallery, the result is a debut solo presentation that treats place as both subject and residue. The exhibition suggests how travel can become image, and how history can surface not as illustration, but as atmosphere.
