Xavier Hufkens is delighted to present a new series of paintings, works on paper and a photographic work by American artist Matt Connors (b. 1973, Chicago). Swap is Connors' third exhibition with the gallery.
Swap; start with two things.
With the scene in a jewel heist film, where a heavy, dirt-filled leather bag is placed on a sensitive pedestal in place of a sought-after treasure, which one then runs away with.
Maybe the dirt from the bag is spilling everywhere, really stressing the not-there-ness, essential to the prize-ness, of the prize. And the jewel is sharp-edged, getting streaked and smudged with the dirt and the sweat in hands and pockets.
And one has both. One is both.
With—
Is it more like a rotating door? This supplementing, this one that runs away,
those large wood or glass pivot doors that turn on a central axis and so have no front or back, are all front, all back, all turn.
A switch, a role reversal, two sides of the imaged equation meet at a bar: head-tails-head
tails-head-tails-head, like a spinning coin flashing its sequence with only modulation between
faces, a constant, invisible series of repetitions and adjustments that accompany inherent
gaps or failures in any effort to really, truly repeat,
summoning and shaking out some sort of new form and form's (and new's) opposite.What painting trades back and forth are these
figures and gestures and ideas and sources as functions and tunings and bargains and re-
commencements. The idea is to make two and fuck with one.
That's three things.
And where we started was dirty in a good way: one who supplants one and one who plants one on one, who
swaps with one, passes it back and forth for taste, makes it twice—how you start is how you finish (painting).
Maybe recursion is a lover's conspiracy in that the object (image) is collision, a sort of setting into motion, subjunctively.
Text by Amelia Stein and Matt Connors. Press release courtesy Xavier Hufkens.
Matt Connors is a painter with a profound interest in technique and colour. His work draws upon the history of painting and processes, particularly minimalism and abstraction, but is also influenced by design, poetry, writing and music. While his visual vocabulary is often borrowed from the modernist canon–colours, gestures, grids, framing devices and compositions–Connors' approach to his work is resolutely contemporary in both method and conception. In terms of materials and colouration, his work triggers emotional and intuitive responses. At the same time, it opens up a range of intellectual questions concerning mimesis, iteration and simulacra. Connors often works in series of interlinked, yet wholly autonomous works, in which a lively dialogue is established between repetition and variations in colours and form. Although his paintings might appear to depict something 'real'–a familiar work of art for example–there is, in fact, no 'original'. Taken to the logical conclusion, Connors' paintings could be viewed as having superseded the reality upon which they are based. Matt Connors is also known for his large-scale installations and artist books.
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