Matthew Best

Untitled, 2013. 30 by 40 inches.

     In October I will be having a solo show of new paintings at ECA+ Gallery (http://www.easthamptoncityarts.com/UpcomingExhibitions) in Eashampton, MA. There will be an opening reception on October 12. This show represents the majority of my efforts for the last year or more. This show is about sensory experience, experiencing the world with all of the senses all at once. 

    I’ve always experienced the world as a tidal wave of sensory information; the five senses competing constantly for my attention. This series of paintings uses the vocabulary of painting to find new ways of depicting the overload, the collapse of the senses into visual form.  It makes use of paintings ability to condense moments of time into a fixed but dynamic image.

     I have become increasingly interested in examining how I process this information, what attracts my eye (pattern, color, contrast), what I love about music (repetition, layering, time). My brain constantly breaks things apart, small part of the whole interest me more than the whole. I find I generally never look at entirety of things; it is too hard to process. Smaller parts are more digestible. My aim was to create paintings that function in the same way; they can be taken as whole but also in smaller bits. Like music this becomes an experience that happens over time. Your eye can follow a particular line as it moves in and out of the picture plane, as color shifts, as layers move in and out of focus. The painting becomes a particular kind of space. This space exists in-between the micro and macro, drawing and writing, interior (mind) and exterior (the body and/or landscape).

     The conflicting stimuli collapse into one another. Layers are built up out of an alternating between an opacity that obscures and hides and a revealing translucency.  Some shapes are completely hidden; other shapes more deeply embedded in the picture plane are exposed by scrapped and sanding the painting down.

Moose Disco, 2013. Acrylic on panel. 24 by 24 inches.