MATTHEW STONE – UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
2014-03-03Unconditional Love introduces lush digitally printed paintings. Stone hand-paints on glass and photographs the resulting compositions. These high-resolution details are then digitally intensified and retouched to remove subjective imperfections, such as dust and hairs. The paint is then printed onto veneered wooden panels, sheet acrylic and mirror. The resulting works employ photography and digital printing as part of an extended artistic process that furthers the visual and practical potential of paint, rather than as an objective or documentarian means to an end.
Almost offensively juicy and often steeped in visceral colour, the works upturn the holy status of art history’s worship of “paint handling” and “brushwork” as untouchable cosmic flesh, whilst simultaneously and sincerely reasserting its living legacy of visceral and emotionally manipulative power. Stone’s paint gestures mimic the movements and colours of Renaissance painting and sculpture and suggest the punchy thrusts and flair of dancers in motion or joyful movement in general. Their genuine love of colour and movement draw the viewer in and celebrate the eye and its joys in the realm of paint. While ostensibly resembling a scaling of the “masterful” brushwork of Motherwell or de Kooning, the final works, perhaps like Lichtenstein’s spoofy quoted strokes, live as flattened snapshots of captured and ephemeral moments. They are digitally composed gestures, flat and practically inert but imaginatively ecstatic. The turns of the wrist that twist the paint into three dimensionality suggest the contrapposto twirl of a dancer or the circular helix of a Michelangelo marble, while the gush of colour is un-gendered orgasm.
Exhibition runs from March 6th to April 6th, 2014
The Hole NYC
312 Bowery
New York
NY
10012
