ART CITIES:Paris-Matthew Porter
Matthew Porter is part of a large group of contemporary artists pushing the boundaries of traditional photographic techniques and blurring the lines of digital and film manipulation. His work often features historical mash- ups, collapsing disparate events and cultural references within a single frame, or in series of tightly edited photographs. What sets Porter apart, however, are his calculated transitions between manipulated and straight photography.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Xippas Archive
In his first solo exhibition in France entitled “The Links Are Joined And Form A Ring”, Matthew Porter presents a series of works inspired by the vocabulary of the avant-garde. Made in the studio of his father, a sculptor inspired by the Modernist period, the photographs in this series feature the cast-offs from the fabrication of his work, the unused wood and steel pieces. With a slightly nostalgic air from this bygone era, the artist gives a second life to these residues destined for disposal. Scraps, wood cuts, shavings and tools are interlaced on the floor, forming almost abstract black and white compositions, where ordinary objects morph from models of utopian cities to Bauhaus constructions, and where toothed wheels, wrenches or metal sheets float above the image as a result of multiple exposures. The metal, whitened by the blinding light of the sun, and the nearly black shadows create areas of complete emptiness, as if the shapes were cut out of the photographic film itself, making the wood, concrete or metal almost palpable. In the exhibition space, two color photographs, imprints of a certain aspiration to the past or a faraway and probably inexistant place, frame the black and white images, creating a kind of parenthesis. These studio photographs of jungle foliage call to mind the ideal tropics, a recurrent dream of Western culture, and evoke the possibility of escape. Much like artists from past centuries who sought inspiration far from civilization, the spectator is immersed in a renewed quest for the uncertain, a mirage. Cherished subjects for avant-garde photography, such as everyday objects, tools, and more generally, the poetry of daily life and machinery, are reinvented in Matthew Porter’s work. Swinging between references to art history and the attempt to emancipate himself from it by writing his own, Matthew Porter’s images play on the gap between nostalgia and the present, the material and the immaterial, the static and the dynamic.
Info: Galerie Xippas, 108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, Duration: 14/4-26/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, www.xippas.com
