Matt Davis, Outpost Gallery, Norswich - The Loss of Remoteness

Matt Davis: The Loss of Remoteness
Outpost Gallery, Norwich
2 - 21 August 2007

As part of its major invitational project - British & European Legs - for Contemporary Art Norwich, OUTPOST presents the first UK solo exhibition of paintings by Berlin based MATT DAVIS.

Matt Davis’ approach to painting inserts a testing construction process within the viewer’s comprehension of pictorial representation. Working from a photographic source image typically selected for its ‘Wir-Gefühl’ - German expression, translating as ‘we feeling’ or feeling of togetherness - the painting’s surface is gradually built from drops of liquid gloss, the resultant relief structure conveying complex interactions of optically constructed colour and the interplay of real reflected light against it’s pictorial depiction.

A fundamental preoccupation of Matt Davis’ work is that a painting may convey the impression of light being emitted from its surface, with the selection of subject matter in this particular series of paintings - football stadia’s floodlit skies and nocturnal fairgrounds - directly supporting this formal concern. The subjects function in other ways; the full frame collective mass of the crowd – the suppression of a compositional figure/ground relationship - enforcing the holistic phenomena of the paintings densely built surface. The individual pools and droplets of paint at times figuratively suggesting a head in the crowd or a single light bulb, while simultaneously evoking something much less tangible - a photon of light or atomic cosmology - rendering any sense of scale and pictorial realism irrelevant.

Working on the flat, the painting’s resolution is sought over long periods, embracing imperfections and obliterating earlier decisions, Matt Davis sees the process of painting as a series of bum notes, waiting to be redeemed by a subsequent phrase.

Matt Davis was born in Colchester in 1969; he studied at Norwich School of Art & Design 1999-2001 and Camberwell College of Arts, London 1988-91. Recent exhibitions include Art Madrid 2006, Soccerart at Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung 2006, Preview Berlin 2006 and a solo presentation at Kunstsalon Wilde Gans, Berlin in 2005. 

OUTPOST
10b Wensum Street, Norwich NR3 1HR
www.norwichoutpost.org