Matt Coyle: Inner City Landscapes
Past exhibition
Overview
Several more recent paintings in acrylic, which Coyle refers to as “Inner City Landscapes,” have smoother surfaces. But Coyle’s choreography of sharp, shadow-based modelling and flat aerosol spray paint make them ravishingly strange. Using a discarded diorama retrieved from a tip and repeatedly photographed from different angles and in different lighting, these haunted compositions evoke a gutted or bombed-out building. Broken forms are silhouetted against the light, creating new shapes that call out to an imagination made freshly susceptible by colors that seem at once sweet and artificial. The resulting pictures are masterly, with shades of Piranesi, Thomas Demand, Glenn Brown and the Giacometti of “The Palace at 4 a.m.”
Coyle can make the fleshy, tactile sensuality of paint seem either abject and disgusting or distant and affectless. In ways that take the imagination straight back to childhood, he plays suggestively with ambiguities of scale and degrees of reality and artifice. He makes images whose meanings are porous and exposed, surpassingly strange and never exhausted.
Coyle can make the fleshy, tactile sensuality of paint seem either abject and disgusting or distant and affectless. In ways that take the imagination straight back to childhood, he plays suggestively with ambiguities of scale and degrees of reality and artifice. He makes images whose meanings are porous and exposed, surpassingly strange and never exhausted.
Sebastian Smee, Art critic, The Washington Post, June, 2023
Works
