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Traditionally, art has commemorated people, places and events, lest they be lost to the sands of time.  But what happens when those shifting sands are the things being commemorated?  Matthew Picton’s exhibition of ten recent works provides fascinating answers.  The dates of these works range from 2016 to 2023, pointing to the labor-intensive nature of the artist’s process.

Read Mark Van Proyen’s entire review at Squarecylinder.com

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Why, as of late, have so many artists taken up mapping as a means of representing the world?  One apparent reason is that maps are prescriptive. They supply directions that can be reliably followed. Artist-made maps, by contrast, challenge consensus reality by subjecting “facts” to experience and imagination, depicting the character of that experience as something shaped not just by geography but by everything else that impacts human life: politics, war, natural disasters, race, religion and culture…

Read the entire review here.

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Matthew Picton, in his exhibition The Age of Kali at Nancy Toomey Fine Art, has created a stunning body of hand-cut mixed media works filled with vitality, historical context, precision, and depth. Through the collating of images and the collapsing of time, dynamic representations of divinity are placed in the present, synthesizing coincident visuals of apocalyptic longing and salvation. Adding weight and power through scale and imagery, Picton explores the many manifestations of contemporary hybridized images of the past, religion, and culture, one in which the viewer can find their own recognition of the patterns of history.

Download the exhibit catalogue here.

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Defined as “The lapse of humankind into a state of sin ascribed in traditional Jewish and Christian theology to the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis”

Throughout history many civilizations and individuals have experienced a seeming and often sudden fall from grace. From the very beginnings of the Twentieth Century, modern civilization, particularly in Europe, seemed to shatter and fail. Few cities experienced a more prolonged version of this than St Petersburg where in the words of Akhamatova “But along the legendary esplanade of the Neva, the Twentieth century approached, not the one on the calendar, the real one”

In the world today there exists an almost constant anxiety about when and in what form it will reappear. Underpinning the fear and anxiety is the fear of survival, loss and death, a background noise of hysteria, drama and paranoia fueled by an invasive media that appears to have an almost hypnotic hold over the populace. In selecting subjects for these sculptures I found myself drawn by films and novels set in cities during periods of struggle and transition, societies and cultures that underwent seismic upheavals. Those histories provide the lessons for today and can serve as examples that in the absence of living memory function as a guard against what can be a complacent amnesia. For each century there is a complete turnover of population, no living memory, replete with the visceral nature of experience to stand against the slow and stealthy erosion of the hard won gains of social progress. Individuals and societies are underpinned by complex historical narratives, narratives that can be re awakened by populist leaders seeking to exploit submerged divisions and grievances. A consequence of this can lead to “The bloody wedding of repression and terrorism” as Albert Camus once said.

The sculptures in this exhibit illuminate the inversions of twentieth century history as illustrated and defined by some of the period’s leading novelists. Those novels were then taken a stage further and staged as cinema. “Barbaric, mystical, bored: here is the last century in summation. A schizophrenic, self-mutilating era in which man flew higher than was dreamed possible and plumbed depths unimaginable; slaughter beyond measure coupled with advances beyond comprehension; collective insanity and individual rationality.” Darragh McManus. Societies throughout history have grappled with the tensions caused by the progressive edge of a culture seeking to evolve humanity at a faster rate than the other half of the populace is ready for, the Twentieth Century illuminated this to a degree unknown in the past. “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are” Marshall Berman

The sculpture of Berlin, The Berlin Alexanderplatz based upon the novel of the same name by Alfred Doblin, set in the Berlin of 1928 is essentially about the fall of an individual, Franz Biberkopf, amidst the pressures of a deteriorating city. The sculpture of Amsterdam, “The Fall” investigates the notion of post war European guilt in the guise of it’s main character Jean Baptiste Clemence. If Franz Biberkopf is ultimately crushed through the corrupt society in which he exists, then Jean Baptiste Clemence seeks to become the bad angel, the ultimate corrupt being who embraces universal guilt and the idea that all are guilty. These two sculptures essentially bookend the traumatic years of the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. The Berlin Alexanderplatz presented a society in which human society was severely compromised morally and ethically and as such created a portrait of a city and nation in which the conditions for the horrors of Nazi Germany were evident.

The sculpture “Moscow, The Master and Margarita” has an interior comprised of tattoos collected by prison warder Danzig Baldaev from 1930 to 1980. The tattoos present an inverted mirror of soviet life “As in a mirror everything the country has gone through has been reflected in prison and camp life” Baldaev. The Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov is set in the Moscow of the 1930s and is a satire of Stalinist Russia, the fall of mankind is illustrated by the tale of Pontius Pilate being forced to acquiesce to the evil passions of the excited mob to allow for the crucifixion of Jesus. The film by Rainer Fassbinder of the novel “Querelle” by Jean Genet creates a closed hermetic world in which the young sailor Querelle inhabits a world turned upside down, where evil is treated as sainthood. Querelle is described by Genet as “The angel of the apocalypse”

The moral order of the prison world is inverted, the most ruthless are on top, power is exercised through the threat of violence. In most stable societies this underworld is kept firmly in place but when corruption pervades a society there is often little difference between the two. It is as though the shadows have infiltrated the culture at large. In many countries most human interactions are tainted and ordered by an invasive corruption. In many of those societies it is only a matter of time before things fall apart.

The sculptures in this exhibition set elements of film, posters and stills within the cartographic landscape of the cities in which they are set. It is almost as if the city forms provide the stage set for the cinematic imagery that has been fragmented across the surfaces.

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Eschatology is a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind, or the ultimate destiny of humankind. The plural version of the word is used in the title to give a sense of a continuing and multiple narrative. The expanding anxieties of the present encouraged by an incessant media relaying images of enormous fires consuming forests, floods, voracious swarms of locusts, all of which equate with the Biblical narratives of war, famine, pestilence, fire and flood. It has almost been as if humanity, with its’ ever increasing levels of anxiety somehow sensed the impending pandemic. This body of work re contextualizes past illustrations of history with present day imagery, bringing the sense that history is a cyclical phenomenon. For example there are the parallels between the present day and the Weimar period in Germany, The Spanish flue epidemic of 1918 and the repeated financial crashes each century typically due to fraud and speculation. Civilization and humanity continuously evolves but still has to contend with the same unseen and underlying forces of nature

This body of work collapses the time line of history, combining Durer’s illustrations from 1498 of St. John’s book of revelations with images of contemporary landscape. The apocalyptic narrative of the New Testament and the medieval vision of it are combined into the present. In her book “Doomsday Dreams”, Eleanor Heartney says “ Every age finds it’s own apocalypse as the eschatological narrative is recast to address contemporary conditions” The works in this exhibit explore the notion of the apocalypse from the perspective of the personal in “Death in Venice” or from the perspective of climate destruction in “The Fall of Stars” Economic collapse and financial catastrophe are viewed in ironic contexts in “The Whore of Babylon” “ A Visitation” and “Markets Routed” . The wider notion of the Apocalypse is explored in “After Life” and “The Four Riders of the Apocalpyse, Berlin 1945” The destructive and apocalyptic results of Colonial history are also explored in the works “The Aguirre Wrath of God” “After Life’ and “The City of London and the Dance of Death” The effects of plague and disease are referenced in “Nosferatu” and also “Death in Venice”

“The Four riders of the Apocalypse, Berlin 1945” is the third in a series that focus upon Twentieth century Berlin. Durer’s depiction of the four riders of the Apocalypse is set above the ruins of Berlin and brings the medieval depictions of Biblical prophesy to the reality of the destruction of a civilization. The Nazi Parties’ own Eschatological fantasies ended up consuming themselves and many millions of others. The sculpture “The Ring” combines Durer’s images of “The Battle of the Angels” with that of “The ride of The Valkyries” and the destruction of Dresden. Of course from the ashes and ruins the new arose and modern Germany is an example of a nation and culture that exhibits impressive evolution from the former incarnation.

My art is inherently political in that it aims to present in visual form the hidden truths of history. Truths that have often been hidden on purpose by the perpetrators from their own people. What is taught of as truth in one country is known to be lies from the perspective of another. A powerful need for secrecy and a desire to maintain a mythological national narrative and identity prevail.

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Philosopher and scientist Alfred Korzybski famously stated that the map is not the territory, asserting his view that the tools we use to represent reality can never fully equal it. Reality- the “territory”- is infinitely inaccessible because our perceptions always intervene to create “mappings” based on our distinct and skewed understandings of the world around us. Matthew Picton’s paper sculptures based on cartographic city plans quite literally take on Korzybski’s ideas concerning representation and reality. Read the Interview…

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July 2013

Ambitious artists in every discipline face the difficulty of working something of the world into what they make. Some years ago, London-born Oregonian Matthew Picton resorted to maps as a solution.

His new work at Toomey Tourell continues to expand on the idea of a map as a footprint of history, not merely of a locale.

In recent years, as in the work on view, Picton has taken to rendering whole blocks or sections of city in aerial view. In “London 1940 — Clerkenwell” (2013) and other pieces here, he has formed upright paper shapes into equivalents of city blocks or standing structures.

In this piece, Picton has characteristically singed the paper cityscape, as a reminiscence of damage done to London during Hitler’s yearlong blitzkrieg bombing campaign. A bomb census kept during the war recorded every air raid’s effects.  Read more…

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