Matt Connors

L'Almanach 18 : Matt Connors

Although Matt Connors’s paintings seem simple and direct at first glance, the multiplicity of processes and references they draw on slowly reveals their complexity.
The American painter seems to have set himself the goal of following abstraction beyond its history. Even though he admits that his influences are mainly musical, literary, or poetic, he fully integrates the memory of painting by reinventing it through improvisation, with elegance and a light touch. As Peter Schjeldhal writes: “beauty occurs like something glimpsed by chance, not exactly sought after nor entirely captured.”
The modesty with which Connors approaches his “job” has not prevented him from becoming one of the prominent figures of contemporary abstraction, alongside other American artists of his generation who have also exhibited at Le Consortium: Joe Bradley, Laura Owens, and Michael Williams.
In Connors’s work, the colors are vibrant, contrasting, saturated. He can paint works with dense or stripped back, meticulous or impulsive, rigorous or lopsided geometric compositions. He plays with effects of transparency and the juxtapositions of pictorial layers, allowing a glimpse of the painting’s construction and of a narrative framework that has been unraveled and then recomposed. For a long time, Connors favored oil paint but now uses only acrylics. His paintings do not seem to be the result of a long process but of a decisive instant caught during a stroll. The performative aspect is visible through the paintwork, marks, drips, splatters, and parts of the canvas left blank. Matt Connors continues to pursue his creative explorations elsewhere than on the canvas, in volumes which give form to painting, or in silkscreen printing which allows him to multiply on paper the ideas that nourish his painting
— Émilie Fourny