About
CARP MATTHEW (b.1980)
Born and raised in Birmingham, England, I am a visual artist practising since 2005 and London based since 2012 working predominantly in oil or acrylic on canvas and ink on paper.
My work is an openly hopeless struggle with, and acceptance of, the eternally unknowable nature of reality. It is about nothing. It is about yearning. It is about the rabid pursuit of purpose and meaning in empty spaces and dead ends, in brain-bending fantasy and fanatic ideology, be it religious, political, occult, economic or otherwise. It is about hiding and lying, farce and the myth of progress.
The figures I paint are lost, in rooms without doors and voids without walls, their mutations manifestations of dying spirit and sickness of soul, of their own repressed fears, denied inadequacies, deranged narcissism and inescapable solitude.
They long for what they can never have without deceiving themselves. Worse than tragic, their movements are meaningless, each simultaneously understanding so fully, and incapable of understanding at all.
My work is a meditation on this predicament, every piece either an attempted exorcism of futility or a desperate grasping at fleeting beauty and momentary loss of self-consciousness to said pleasure. A tangible solidification of the creeping nihilism that permeates every atom of this age, It is an open ended view of all life as mere spectacle and an exploration of the mind's ceaseless rejection of such. And ultimately it is about how it feels to exist without faith in anything beyond love.
Selected recent exhibitions:
2018 - ‘Godliness’ group show, Leontia Gallery, London.
2018 - The Other Art Fair Autumn edition, Victoria House, London.
2018 - The Other Art Fair Spring edition, Victoria House, London.
2018 - 'Figure it out' group show, Leontia Gallery, London.
2017 - The Other Art Fair Autumn edition, Old Truman Brewery, London.
2017 - 'Pitch Black' group show, Leontia Gallery, London.
2017 - The Other Art Fair Spring edition, Victoria House, London.
2017 - Pancakes and Booze Art Show, Studio Spaces E1, London.
2016 – Creative Debut’s Showcase, The Black and White Building, Shoreditch, London.
2015 – Proparty, The Winter Salon, Notting Hill, London.
2014 – Manor House Art Show at the Inhouse Film Festival, Manor House, London.
2012 – Don’t Follow Leaders, Central Library, Birmingham.
2011 – Various Bastards, Chameleon Gallery, Walsall.
Selected bibliography:
Society 6 - Art Quarterly book No.2.4, Autumn 2017. USA.
Dead-End Chaos journal of drawing, issue 1, summer 2017. UK.
Art School - The Raritan Gallery, issue 1, summer 2017, USA.
Milkfist Magazine, Untitled, Issue two, Winter 2016, USA.
Brut Magazine, Oddity, Issue five, Summer 2016, UK.
Meghan O’Gieblyn, Hell; The new strategy for dealing with damnation, The Point Magazine, Issue nine, Winter 2015, Canada.
The Mankind Diary, Round six, September 2015, Australia.
Lamono Magazine, Issue forty two, April 2008, Spain.