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Written by Joe DiRosa
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MATT GREENE
SURRENDER
NOVEMBER 9 - DECEMBER 23, 2006
76 GRAND STREET
Deitch Projects is pleased to present Surrender, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Matt Greene. This new suite of paintings is inspired by erotica and its screenic image as a vehicle to address formal concerns such as surface, color, and space.
Known for his ethereal landscapes of fleshy fungi and bushy bombshells, Matt Greene continues in this series an exploration of his favorite shelves in the library: horticulture, vintage pornography, horror films, fairy tales, 19th Century Symbolist art, and of course
the history of Modernism. These disparate interests—and the weighty themes of gender, sexuality, and epistemology that accompany them— Greene masterfully approaches in a hallucinatory,visionary manner allowing them to come together in
phantasmagoric splendor on his canvases.
In Apparitions, we see a spreading out into space of Greene’s normally clustered and congealed nymphettes. Here holographic bodies writhe in superimposed planes of space, separated by Greene with glowing quadrilaterals of lush colour. These
vaguely sinister apparitions are sometimes interspersed with skeletons or swords, incongruous objects problematizing the average-Joe fantasy and alerting the viewer that much more is going on here than the familiar poses might betray.
In The Silken Trap/ Abnormal Orgasm we see a similar evocative pose repeated as though in an enclosed space filled with mirrors. A second horizon line of repeated female forms is introduced behind it, and is blended into the primary figure plane with ejaculatory
white splotches. That We Do Not Appear to Fly is of Little Consequence shares this compositional trope but circulates not only wicked witch silhouettes and fetishistic striped thigh-highs, but also all manner of poisonous plants and verdant washes.
In both Surrender paintings we find one of Greene’s familiar compositional devices, that of the overall and serialized figural dispersal. Here, anonymous-looking tarts pout and pose amidst halloweenish witches and mushrooms. The occasional deletion of the girl’s
body, leaving only the fetish-attire, suggests the depersonalization already present from the composition, where the figures are mere props for the fetish, and all included personages seem iterable sex- crazed dolls.
While the subject matter may at times seem deliberately kitsch, the practice in which it is elaborated upon is not, and it is the tension created between those two disparate tendencies wherein the paintings gain their exciting suggestibility.
Although Matt Greene is already known to New York audiences through his participation in group exhibitions such as Scream at Anton Kern in 2004, this is his first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue with an essay by Benjamin Weissman.
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONTACT JASMINE LEVETT AT 212 343 7300
WWW.DEITCH.COM
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