With the insight of a storyteller, the intricacy and breadth of a historian, and the meticulous hand of a sculptor, Matthew Picton charts legacies of human experience through immersive artworks that foster understanding and connection. Exquisite strata of cut paper beckon with visual narratives, making tangible the multidimensional bonds of communal history, personal memory, and artistic expression. Each layer retains solidity as it finds common ground with its neighbors. Picton’s skill and dedication in researching, selecting, and synthesizing material is such that the connections, once mapped, seem inevitable.
A Deeper Picture builds on the creative trajectory of Picton’s oeuvre, further excavating how art translates and interacts with the span of lived experience. The metaphysical films of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky buttress the new works, carving avenues from Picton’s 2022-24 Rome series galvanized by Italian director Federico Fellini. Film stills weave with art-historical echoes and architectural blueprints in hypnotic fusions that translate the thematic centers and visual sensations of each director’s cinematic artistry.
Architecture serves as a physical stage and conceptual bedrock of each piece. Paper effigies of gothic cathedrals and the meticulous drawings of Rome by 19th-century French architect Paul Letarouilly provide tangible settings, which Picton enlivens with overlays of film stills and paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. For Picton, each edifice mirrors the liminal experience of cinema. Literal and conceptual spaces that offer communion and respite, portals beyond time that transmute human life and foster connection, sometimes verging on the divine.
Together, the suite of sculptures also captures a lens inspired by David Hockney’s work in the 2010s—embodied by the 2012 exhibition, A Bigger Picture. Seeking to move beyond the single-point perspective of traditional painting and photography, Hockney asserted that true comprehension requires active engagement and that art should coax viewers from a habitually passive gaze by reproducing the physiological authenticity of visual experience. To render the transportive sensation of film, Picton translates Hockney’s colliding vantage points and widened perspectives into sublime topographies that pulse with life beyond the immediate visual plane. Color, pattern, and tactile dimension activate the senses and generate expansive scenes that offer seemingly infinite paths of visual approach and narrative realms that encourage close examination and reflection. In each revelation, a deeper picture settles.
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Titled for the Ancient Roman stadium famed for chariot races, triumphal processions, and gladiator fights, Circus Maximus translates the sensation of mass spectacle. The optical terrain incorporates Letarouilly drawings of the eponymous monument, 18th-century etchings by Piranesi of its fellow, the Colosseum, and film stills from Fellini’s 1972 Roma merged with Ridley Scott’s 2000 epic Gladiator. Four panels create a monumental space for the eye to explore through every vantage point of the ancient foundations as Fellini’s audience apparitions guide the eye in a rhythmic ellipse around the action and beyond the frame. As in the movies, idealized memories of architectural might and human prowess engulf solitary perspectives and transport audiences through an encounter that elides time and space.
The Colosseum also features prominently in Forum, cut through with drawings reconstructing the prime era of Ancient Rome’s titular center of religious and civic life. Picton mirrors the Colosseum with Bruegel’s 1563 painting The Tower of Babel, which was inspired by the mythic proportions and storied significance of the monumental amphitheater. Bruegel’s biblical tower radiates through the prolific arches of the stone edifice, dispersing attention—like language in the mythic landscape—across the sculpture and through seemingly infinite depths of architectural and religious symbolism. Inlays of Raphael’s 1520s painting, The Vision of the Cross, invites further riches from the living memory of ruins that witnessed the Eternal City evolve from pagan roots to monotheistic orthodoxy.
For the enigmatic films of Tarkovsky, architectural memory imparts stability and synthesizes a thematic nucleus that shapes the director’s work. This new suite of sculptures continues the theological excavations Picton began in 2019, exploring the nature of faith and the spaces it occupies through an expanded lens of artistic practice and vision. Picton’s material portraits of Tarkovsky’s films express a shared tenet and goal of the artists, that the very essence of making art is an act of faith, compelled by a drive to express the totality of the human condition.
Nostalgia encompasses Tarkovsky’s 1983 titular movie, which for the director embodied a uniquely Russian disposition in the longing for home and marked his first film outside the Soviet Union after self-exile fueled by state censorship. The film stands out for Picton, who began watching double bills of Tarkovsky at The Scala in London in the ‘80s when the director was still active. The surreal sculpture gives physical form to the film’s central pull between the East and West, fusing images of the protagonist’s Russian homeland with the 13th-century Cistercian ruins of San Galgano Abbey in Tuscany, where the protagonist concludes his spiritual odyssey. Picton further emphasizes the experience of this dichotomy through cut outs of Letarouilly’s drawings of Old St. Peters Basilica in Rome—a 4th-century memorial to the origins of Catholicism before the East-West schism. Definitions of place and identity emanate from the intricately pierced sculpture, creating a vision concretized in ancient architecture yet boundless in time.
Scenes from Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia repeat throughout Picton’s sculptures, including a narrative undercurrent from the film in No Great Masters. Letarouilly’s illustration of Michelangelo’s designs for the Campidoglio, Renaissance Rome’s religions and political center, impart the sculpture’s architectural structure. Film stills glow like embers from within, rendering the self-self-immolation of Tarkovsky’s tragic character, Domenico, as he stands atop the famed equestrian sculpture of Rome’s philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius to proclaim the cessation of civilization’s “great masters.” The material space of the sculpture harmonizes with the visceral cinematic echoes in a synchronic visual that requires a concentrated, agile gaze as the layers seem to dissolve in real time.
The monumental Cathedral and distilled glimpse of Hunter Stalker similarly request patience and slow examination as they condense thematic realms of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre. Scenes from Nostalgia and the surreal 1979 Stalker blend seamlessly with 16th-century Flemish landscapes to transform the commanding gothic edifice of Cologne Cathedral into a mirage of cut paper. Bruegel’s The Return of the Herd, The Harvesters, and The Hunters in the Snow—all from a 1565 series, the latter a touchstone that echoes throughout Tarkovsky’s films—breathe life into Cathedral’s ecclesiastical foundations. The spired heights undulate with the mystery of “The Zone,” Tarkovsky’s wasteland where Stalker’s beleaguered protagonists seek proof of hope, purpose, and salvation. Replacing stained glass windows, Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished 15th-century painting The Adoration of the Magi draws the eye into the German cathedrals vaulted depths and pays homage to the original purpose of the structure—to house and protect relics of the biblical trio.
Picton translates Tarkovsky’s cinematic time and stream-of-consciousness narratives through physical constructions that synthesize human, religious, and geographical memory into living entities. Every inch of paper becomes a mirror; every graceful cut a window—entry points to consider the monuments constructed, places traversed, stories told, and art created as acts of faith propelled by an innately human search for home, solace, and inspiration. In each sculpture on view, parallel acts of making and viewing create an exchange of engaged presence and constitute a communion with the stories that animate everything around us, a deeper picture waiting just below the surface.