Matt Clark paints in layers that consume each other. Paint is spread, scraped, sanded, poured, and compressed, and each pass both reveals and buries the one before it, so the finished surface is a record of its own revision. In 2020 he began doing this to another man’s photographs. The method did not change. What changed is that there was now something underneath that he had not made and could not remake.
Biography
Clark took a B.A. in art history at Arizona State University in 1995 and an M.F.A. in painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2002. He lives in Dallas, where he is Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Texas at Arlington and is represented by Conduit Gallery. He has exhibited across the United States since 2002, in solo shows including Maitri and Until the Sun Rises at Conduit, Sacred Place at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in Lubbock, and Fracture at Artspace 111 in Fort Worth. More than twenty international corporate collections hold his work. He describes his subject as place: the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual.
In the collection’s words
The Space Between is acrylic on inkjet color photographs, every work 38 by 26 inches, all of them made in 2021. Each one is unique, and unique here is a physical fact rather than a claim: paint on a print cannot be lifted off again. The photograph can be printed a second time. What Clark makes cannot.
The discipline of the series is knowing when to stop. His own paintings are free to bury everything beneath them, and often do. Here the photograph stays readable, so he is working against his own method, and what holds the attention is how far he goes before he does not. New Mexico is not the only collaboration of this kind he has made. There is a second, in Oaxaca.
Continue exploring
- The Space Between, the series, shown here
- William Greiner, whose photographs are underneath it
- Carrier Wave, Randy L. Barton and Cloudface, the other collaboration we have shown
- Paintings and prints in the collection and all artists at Webster Collection
- Webster Collection
