ART CITIES:Tokyo-Matt Saunders

Grounded in painting, Matt Saunders’ work crosses boundaries between that medium, photography, and short animated films. He often works with oil, metallic ink, and cut paper on both sides of Mylar sheets or unprimed canvas. Through an early introduction to the performative films of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, Saunders developed an interest in how personality is expressed in moving and still images.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blum & Poe Galery Archive

Matt Saunders’ s source imagery has included Polaroids taken of movies playing on his television screen, found portraits, and publicity stills. The subjects of his work are often obscure film muses who were iconic at one time and who hold personal significance for the artist based on their fleeting, sometimes tragic celebrity. He focuses on such figures as the Warhol film starJoe Dallesandro, the German actor Udo Kier, the Danish silent film star Asta Nielsen or the German actress Hertha Thiele, among many others, all of who repeatedly appeared and disappeared throughout 20th-century avant-garde cinema. For “Two Worlds”, his first solo exhibition in Tokyo, the artist debuts two new interrelated bodies of work a multi-screen animated film and new “paintings” in the form of unique photographic prints. Designed specifically for the gallery space, “Two Worlds” is a vivid, fast-moving projection onto two screens that reflects on the ways video can both define and exceed its bounds. The video is composed of thousands of drawings, both narrative and abstract, made using materials that range from pencil to ink to oil. Derived from a broad catalog of sources, such as experimental film, West German television and internet clips, the drawings blot from one to the next, or else move through mirroring, allusion, and metonymy into a loose, almost narrative cycle. Saunders’ photographs are made by exposing paper to light shone through paintings, a technique he has used in various ways for the past several years. The resulting unique prints transpose the materials and processes of painting into the fleeting, time-based realm of the darkroom. In his newest works, Saunders delves further into this practice and binds it more closely to the moving-image work, often using drawings from the animation and handmade color filters, as part of the light source to expose the paintings. These two worlds map together in dynamic, unpredictable ways.

Info: Blum & Poe Gallry, 1-14-34 Jingumae, Shibuya, Tokyo, Duration: 22/1-/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.blumandpoe.com