Confetti in a Storm: Matthew Quick

The exhibition features paintings from three of the major series within Matthew’s artistic investigations: Pure, Monumental Nobodies, and Mirror Electric.The major leitmotif of the current iteration of each of the series illustrates Matthew’s focus on the human condition, climate change, corporate greed, and our altered relationship with the surrounding environment through social media and the use of mobile devices.

Upon graduating from the arts faculty at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, and while continuing his art practice, Matthew also embarked on a multi-faceted career as a creative director, advertising agent, university lecturer, photographer, salesman, copyrighter, and published author and novelist. His varied engagements took him around the world and enriching him, via osmosis, through a crash course on socio-political education of the Asia-Pacific region, and in particular Singapore and Malaysia, where the artist had lived and worked for a prolonged period of time. His extensive travels to India, China, Burma, Russia, Bolivia, Nepal, and Chile exposed him to further political regimes and social upheavals, enriching the narrative programme of his imaginative, erudite, and socially engaged paintings.

The eight paintings from Pure series are united by the romanticised background of spectacular cloudscapes, worthy of the creations of such nineteenth-century British masters as Turner and Constable. Featuring masterful chiaroscuro, subtle tonal shifts, and inner luminosity, they provide the background to the social commentary and political satire, commenting on the current issues as well as giving an insight into the dystopian future. Pure Competition and Pure Control question the space race spendings; Pure Responsibility and Pure Liberation focus on the corporate greed; while Pure Speculation, with the bloating light house, provides a glimpse into the dystopian future of risen ocean levels.

Six paintings from Monumental Nobodies series were inspired initially by the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003. Each of the paintings is based on an actual statue or a celebrated monument, which, at the time of its creation, from the Roman Empire to the present day, was meant to encapsulate the hopes and dreams of the empires past and present. Matthew’s erudite take reinterprets the statues through the revisionist lenses of the present day-notions of gender, masculinities, and nationalism.

Last but not least, the exhibition includes four works from Matthew’s immensely popular Mirror Electric series. Painted by Matthew on mirrored aluminium, they comment on our engagement with works of art through mobile phone devices. The mirrored surfaces confront the viewer with an ‘instant selfie’,while the ironic reference to the ubiquitous filters inspire Matthew’s erudite, hash-tagged titles.