23 June 2008

Matt Saunders

Matt Saunders (Courtesy of the artist)

(The following article is taken from the U.S. Department of State publication, Art on the Edge: 17 Contemporary American Artists.)

Udo (Egomania) #4, 2001. Oil on linen. (Courtesy of the artist and Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York, NY)

"Performance and self-consciousness, spectatorship and emulation are, by now, well-worn ideas, and mass cultural models have replaced the individual and family as basic units of philosophy and psychology. The culture market has swollen larger than any language that could describe it. We are, more than ever, finely attuned to the minor movements of things – a hyper-sophisticated, mannered world of virtuosic culture portraying itself. Film, and, in other ways, history are our basic texts – or subtexts. Online and on the streets, we stage elaborate performances of our passions for them. Nevertheless, the individual film, and the individual viewer, are mostly maudlin. And amazing.

Jack Smith, and, in practice, Warhol, established ways of describing what happens with "actors all incandescently amok." My work began with an obsession with these recorded, almost intimate moments of performances that break down or never get started, or over-perform. History, too, over-performs (as does painting, usually). As I worked, the play between these found portraits of actors and their publicity stills went more into manner and style, and the amplification historical moments give to them. I work evenly between painting, drawing, and moving image, and I want my work to be specifically referential, extremely personal, and ultimately generalized and moving. Among other things, the work is self-implicating – a diagram of my own preoccupations. Most recently, it's gone into the romance time in film, as it overlays lives, careers, plots, performances, and my own viewership."

[Matt Saunders (b. 1975, Tacoma, Washington) attended Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut (2000, MFA Painting/Printmaking), and Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1997, BA Visual and Environmental Studies). He has had solo exhibitions in numerous venues including Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York City (2003); Galerie Analix Forever, Geneva, Switzerland (2001); and Holyoke Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1999). His awards and honors include a Robert Schoelkopf Fellowship (2001), a Louis Sudler Prize (1997), and a Thomas T. Hoopes Prize (1997). Saunders lives and works in Berlin, Germany.]