Matthew Mann

Artist Statement

As an analytical daydreamer, my painting practice uses puzzlement, humor, materiality and art historical visual language to parse contemporary visual problems and create moments of associative freedom from them. Rendered with fussy glazes, gestural abstraction, collage and printmaking, my work uses humor and puzzlement as a framework for viewers to overlay their own knowledge and experiences.

Subjects like punk fliers, luxury commodities, literary and philosophical title pages and architecture alternately obscure, hover and overlap each other in the landscape. The landscape and all of these subjects are all encoded by a range of subtexts, from utopianism to commodity culture, that are teased out in the paintings through the materiality of the painting as well as the dates, place names, titles and texts that dot the pictures.