Andrew Mattock
History
• Ex-Pat
• Ex-Waiter
• Ex-Race Car Driver
• Ex-Salesman
• Ex-Ceramicist
• Ex-Husband
• Ex-Short Order Cook
• Ex-Shop Assistant
• Ex-CEO
• Ex-Rugby Player
• Ex-Goal Keeper
• Expelled from School
Statement
‘I am the first person who’ll put it to you and the last person who’ll explain it to you.’
Bob Dylan
Like trying to tell somebody how to ride a bicycle, I really cannot write it down. Words can’t possibly tell the whole story they just scratch a shiny surface. As the things that matter to me start to look different as I look at them from different places. This is my recent best effort ……
My work is experiments with motifs, iconography and wanting to be somewhere else; it’s a re-interpretation of contemporary visual culture in a clickable reality. I strive to make my paintings narrative, but usually images that has been sand blasted into my cortex, by every conceivable form of bloody mundane media, result in a dialogue of a real or imagined history of the mid-20th century.
Having an industrial background, the works are usually conceived with power tools and constructed in a frenzy of bonding agents and paint, We live in an age when every image can be perfectly reproduced
so retaining a sloppy or slapdash element is required.
There’s never a single source of inspiration—its a mash up of medias, sleazy fiction, naked wrestling posters, comics about war, ‘New Idea’ and washing up adverts, all pointless but illustrating our chaotic, physical and incomprehensive world.
It’s not about labels; it’s a puzzle that I don’t really want to solve, for me it’s about trying to keep those inconsistencies, and rough edges that make the human experience sometimes delightful. It’s about paint, emphasising a tactility and physicality that, hopefully can’t be digitally replicated.
Above all else these paintings I have crafted are white noise on multiple layers dealing with black/white, dark/light, male/female and the Two Ronnie’s. Or it might just be a Gemini thing.
Publications
Dec 2010 ABC 774 Radio ‘Interview (2nd Dec)
Dec 2010 Port Philip Leader ‘Lots of give, less take’ (1st Dec)
Nov 2010 The Age Interview ‘ ’(30th Nov) http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/like-the-artwork-feel-free-to-take-it-home-with-you-20101129-18dti.html
Nov 2010 The Australia ‘Interview (19th Nov)
July 2010 The Age Interview (12th July) http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/gist-of-a-wink-with-a-smile-20100711-105ky.htm
July 2010 The Age (1st July)
July 2010 Q Magazine
June 2010 Melbourne Weekly (28th June)
Jan 2010 Queer Taste (Website)
Feb 2009 The Age on Sunday ‘The Visual Art Thing To Do’ (15th Feb)
Jan 2009 The Vine.com ‘Sleazy paperback inspiration’
Selected Solo Exhibitions
Jan 2011 ‘Orally Stimulated’ Surface Pop, Melbourne VIC
July 2010 ‘Heavenly Bodies’ Green-Wood Gallery Melbourne VIC
Jan 2010 ‘Super-Vixens’ Gasworks Art Park Melbourne VIC
Feb 2009 ‘Sleaze’McCulloch Gallery, Melbourne VIC
April 2008 ‘Subjugation of the Blue Demon’McCulloch Gallery, Melbourne VIC
Solo Installation Exhibition
Dec 2010 ‘Twatter’ Gasworks Art Park Melbourne VIC
