ROB MATTHEWS Fragments
Fragments is comprised of several expansive works of acrylic on canvas, each of which originated from a small-scale collage created by Matthews. Portions of those collages were then carefully selected, isolated, and enlarged into a painting on canvas. This new body of Matthews’ work is a natural extension of his multifaceted artistic journey throughout the years, highlighting the core aspects of his practice - hyper-realistic drawings, portrait-based paintings, intricate collages.
I work with a few simple goals like shape and color. I get a few of those pieces under my belt and then think, “I miss using line.” So I bring the line back. Then I tire of shape. Then I miss shape. I work with a saturated palette for a while and miss muted tones. You can see where this is all going. -- RM 2024
These works are are a culling of extraneous elements. If you think of my paintings as a stack of layers, I peeled off a layer at a time to see what was necessary. Over time, I convinced myself that the bottom layer was all that was necessary.
A person may get less literal with age or become more comfortable with ambiguity. Let the mystery be. I have less concrete ideas to communicate now. I am more interested in less tangible ideas, like joy or peace. Not in a hippie way. Pursuing joy is enough to sustain a career.
There are no definitive answers here. There is room to form your own relationship with the work .
Rob Matthews lives and works in Nashville. He received his MFA in painting and printmaking from the Virginia Commonwealth University and his BFA in painting from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is a two-time winner of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship award and won the Pew Fellowship in the Arts award in 2009. His work is frequently exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, and Nashville and is in the collections of North Carolina Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of the Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the de Young Museum of San Francisco.
