Bob Matthews’ Face Yourself is an exhibition of supernatural, spiritual, and delicately refined works. Their pleasure lies in the knowledge of the place we are being taken to, into a woodland world, an uncommon place with a different belief system.
The exhibition title, Face Yourself draws upon a visit that the artist made to an experimental forest commune in Germany where the act of constant self-evaluation, often through art, was central to the life of that community and their political ideals. These paintings and objects are a departure from his earlier representational landscapes that conveyed peaceful, pictorial scenes incorporating memory, history and culture. The new work creates dense layers of organic forms through over-painting and complex stencilling, where nocturnal passages break through the dense undergrowth and recognizable graphic imagery or figurative elements come to the forefront. The viewer is invited to look through, and ultimately beyond the worlds he presents to explore their humanistic condition.
Using wood as the main material, Matthews juxtaposes two and three-dimensional elements to create provocative vantage points to experience his work. The play of inner and outer worlds in these surrealist paintings is made apparent through display on easel-like structures or wooden hanging forms to create a home-grown sense of craft. Rather than just viewing the picture plane, the current paintings and sculptures merge to create a painted world where the familiar becomes abstracted to form an ethereal atmosphere. The viewer is asked to consider the alignment between the layered compositions and the clusters of objects to understand their self-reflective nature.
Bob Matthews (b. 1972) lives and works in London and has an upcoming solo exhibition at Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco in Spring 2009. Recent exhibitions include Hope and Despair at Cell Project Space, London and Layer Cake at Fabio Tiboni Arte Contemporanea, Bologna, Italy. Recent curatorial projects include World-Gone-Mad: Surrealist Returns in Recent British Art which toured to Herbert Read Gallery, Castlefield Gallery, and Limehouse Arts Foundation in the UK.
