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.

. . .

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.

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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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