Christopher Cutts Gallery is pleased to present its second solo exhibition of new paintings by Matthew Carver.
Carver received his Masters with distinction in 2005 from Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London, U.K. Carver lived abroad for a decade (2002 – 2012) in Berlin, London, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.
Art critic Kevin Temple, in an essay about Carver’s current body of work, states that: “In Night of the World, for the first time, Carver expands the political arena to stage the art world itself. Here, he paints the libidinal economy of contemporary art as it appears in the tastefully modernist domains of elite, global collectors. The opulent minimalism of these art-adorned spaces betrays a lack of life: besides two Dobermans and a pond of koi—themselves status symbols more than pets—the only inhabitants of this elite world are decorations, figures in the paintings-within-paintings. With no lives to depict, Carver frees the spaces for us to inhabit as we shift our gaze from one piece to another, only to find the work on the walls inscribed on the walls in the work. With this visual recursion, Carver implicates himself, and us, too, in the space he paints and thereby in his critique. Last to appear, the darkness of these paintings, the trap of the trappings of capital, resolves only with a careful look, the violent explosions mostly relegated offstage.”