PETER MATTHEWS
SURROUNDINGS
24 May – 22 June, 2013
1 Surroundings presents recent works by British artist Peter Matthews, including
15 stream of consciousness drawings and a video-work, all created while the
artist was adrift in isolation for prolonged periods of time off the Pacific Coast
of Hawaii.
In the broadest sense, Matthews' practice concerns the natural world that is
mapped and recorded through his own physical processes that draw attention to
the futility of the individual and his action in the greater environment. The
resulting works combine a fascination with the mystical and sublime,
articulated through an obsessive and wholly subjective recording of the lull of
the tides. Matthews is captivated by a repetitive and insatiable desire to
understand elements of the natural world that - although calculable and
explainable through modern science - seem to evade our emotive
comprehension: who we are and what is our purpose in the universe is always
an emotive concept, and despite calculable reasoning, Matthew's reminds us
that, as humans, we operate as solipsistic and rather insignificant remarks on a
much greater temporal and spatial plane.
It is a largely poetic concept previously and most commonly explored by 20th
Century literary genius: Coleridge or Kant, where it is equated with
wonderment and terror in equal measure. Metaphorically, it recalls Borges'
endless Library of Babylon, which romantically and incomprehensibly holds a
copy of every book ever published: each edition, every language, and particular
copy. Modern science understands that the human brain can only picture
numbers of up to a dozen, maybe twenty - cognitive thought collapses at one
thousand or one billion: we simply cannot 'picture it', and these individual
elements become folded abstract concepts for us to ponder metaphorically, or
otherwise entirely.
As a persona, even more directly, we are able to draw correlations between
Matthews as artist and the woebegone, seafaring Santiago in Hemingway's Old
Man and the Sea - adrift at sea, captured somewhere between mortality and
respect for his great adversaries - the fish, the sea; or Coleridges Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner, for Matthews' albatross is a practice defined by the
artistic obsess, leading him repeatedly, over the course of a number of years, to
the Ocean to attempt to record and understand its vast brilliance.
Through the simplicity of the works, Matthew's comments as much on
performance and 'the conceptual' as he does the two-dimensional picture plane.
For these are drawings that are not really about drawing at all, but rather
about man's inability to recapture the momentary sublime held in the vastness
of nature, the bleak romanticism in the ocean as it consumes and
intoxicates. Through extended hours (sometimes Matthews will abscond
himself for up to 9 hours, adrift alone at sea,) Matthews is working in real time
through a very direct approach and immediate relationship with the ocean,
2 where it becomes evident that his process is so much less about draftsmanship
or material and more about an idea connected to nature and
personal spirituality: through the drawings, Matthews seeks to question and
challenge the nature of the image as something that requires subject matter. He
questions us, as to whether the drawing can capture an essence, a thought, a
momentary fleeting feeling.
For Matthews, there is an immediacy and connectivity in his practice that
articulates something that even a painting cannot - for a painting is about
production, and these drawings are not about the artist's studio or statement:
they are about a place and moment in time. Most recently, he has begun pairing
his works with videos which offer perhaps the most straightforward
documentation of a practice defined by its very indefiniteness, its
incalculability, and the presence of video may be more apt to
contextualize something that drawing, even after hours and hours drifting in the
ocean, may not be able to fully explain for his viewer.
As a science of incomprehensible thought, one might consider his through even
the same viewfinder that considers an artist like JMW Turner, for both were
concerned with the artistic exploration of a sense of the natural
sublime through (what was considered to be at the time) a largely abstract
handling of conventional media. Or perhaps more contemporarily, his drawings
reference the celebrated Drawing Restraint series that has defined Matthew
Barney's career as one of concept and idea more than it could ever be summed
through excellence in any one media. Similarly, Matthew's work is motivated
by the notions of discovery and exploration, the journey to jettison oneself
from a world that is radically changing in speed, scale, direction, and to realign
oneself back with the cosmic cycles of being a human being questioning where
we are in the universe.
3 4 5 6 7 PETER MATTHEWS graduated in Fine Art with Honours from Nottingham
Trent University (2001) where he obtained his MFA (2003). He has been
included in numerous group exhibitions internationally The Experience of Time
through Contemporary Art North Carolina Museum of Art, North Carolina and
Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, USA (2013); Sea Journeys, Künstlerhaus
Dortmund, Germany (2013); Glasklar Milchig, Forum Factory, Berlin,
Germany (2013) and Drawn, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol,
England (2013). He also had recognized solo exhibition including Continuum,
James Cohan Gallery, New York, USA (2011) and Sea Marks, Mendes Wood
Gallery, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2011). This is Matthew's second time exhibiting
with Beers.Lambert Contemporary, but his first solo exhibition with the
gallery.
1 Baldwin Street London, UK EC1V 9NU Tel: +44(0) 207 502 9078 Email: [email protected] 8