PAULNACHE
PRESENTS
MATTHEW COUPER
BONE INDEX
8 FEBRUARY – 30 MARCH 2019

View catalogue [Download 8MB}

View works

View limited edition lithograph print

Bone Index – Artists statement:

“I use symbols in my work as a kind of visual currency. I select and manipulate signifiers of power, bureaucracy, infrastructure and territories – Aztec monkey priests, Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Join or Die!’ sliced serpent, unicorns and bald eagle Great Seals - and adapt them to create a graphe in contemporary meaning that might make sense now or later. John Ruskin believed the longer J. M. W. Turner lay in his grave, generations of yet unborn would see the powerful light of nature through his art. Grandiose, but you get the idea.

My interest in cryptozoology lies between the multiplicity of meanings of the forms and the pseudo-science of it – kind of like figurative painting in the way that ‘not letting the truth get in the way of a good story’ seems to manifest in the process of making an artwork. In a way, I see parallels between Bernard Heuvelmans and Charles Darwin when thinking about making art. I mean, there’s always some speculation, a need to will something into existence, (or even a trait to imbue in the subject) in order to get a point across - whether it’s Giotto’s frescoed simultaneity, Goya’s Disasters of War or Soviet agitprop. I still feel the need to find something ‘true’ in the work, even in these pluralistic times of media manipulation and “alternative facts”.

To have these works exhibited in the sub-basement crypt  - now exhibition space - of an historic church in the Franco-Basque country just adds to the context of what I am trying to achieve in these painted objects. 

Was it Darwin who first evolved the scientific link between species? – animals and humans? I’ve seen anthropomorphism between the two portrayed in extant visual forms by the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Hindu and the Maya - of course not ‘scientific’, but anachronistic and apotropaic. When considering physical mass – ‘the real thing’ - we want to see some bone structure and framework so we know that it moves. The skin provides the alluring beauty, a trompe l’oeil to a Jeux d'esprit, but we know that the bones are in there and also what they signify – the symbol of the skull, the fallacy of the extra female rib, the funny bone and wisdom teeth. The inside helps shape the outside. When the two are presented in an accident or deformity we’re presented with a corporeal fellowship of beauty and reality. The macro and micro combine and pierce through like the Flammarion philosopher journeyman breaching the firmament skin of the sky into the celestial realm.  This is the real and unreal visual currency I like to trade in.” – Matthew Couper, April 2017

Biography:

Matthew Couper was born in New Zealand and is based in Las Vegas after immigrating to the USA in 2010. His practice over the past decade has appropriated aspects of western Art History including Trecento, Quattrocento and the Baroque. Through these painterly investigations, he discovered that history oft repeats and helped him determine that Modernist notions of originality held little interest for his practice. Couper uses the established narrative traditions of Spanish Colonial retablos and ex-votos to discuss the space between myth, religion and art politics. Huffington Post art critic John Seed recently referred to Couper as an "artist with a Kafkaesque view of the world" whose imagery suggests "a pagan Catholic Cirque du Soleil”

Couper graduated with a BFA from the Quay School for the Arts, Whanganui, New Zealand in 1998. In 2003, he was awarded a Royal Over-Seas League International Scholarship to work and travel in the UK. He returned in the following year to exhibit at Jerwood Gallery, London and to continue traveling in Europe. He held his first public gallery solo exhibition with published monograph, The Museum Of Inherent Vice at the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, after receiving a nine-month residency at the Tylee Cottage Artist in Residence programme in 2007. His exhibition ‘Thirty-Three’ (with gallery publication) is touring several New Zealand public art galleries and museums from 2012 to 2014. Couper was awarded an Arquetopia Artist Residency in Puebla City, Mexico in 2016. His work featured in a large State-wide survey exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2016 and 2017, along with an Artist Print Residency at Idem Paris (in association with Komela) and an artist residency at Manoir du Bonhere, Normandie, France. At present, he is the inaugral Artist in Residence at Aeolian Acres: Elsewhere Residency, Colorado, USA

He exhibits throughout New Zealand and is represented by PAULNACHE, Gisborne. In the USA at Room, Brooklyn, NYC and La Luz De Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles; and in France at Galerie Gimpel et Muller / Espace Delire in Paris. 

His works are represented in public collections throughout New Zealand (Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, The Real Art Roadshow touring collection, the Celia Dunlop Foundation collection and James Wallace Collection, Auckland) and internationally (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Rome and Brisbane; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; Cirque du Soleil Resident Show Division, Montreal and Las Vegas) and in private collections in New Zealand, Australia, USA, UK, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Thailand and the Philippines.

Links:

Artist Website: http://www.mattcouper.com
'The Gravy' artist interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKR5PVBbrnQ
Eric Minh Swenson film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4fa_D8loYM
‘Huffington Post’ article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/matt-couper-painter_b_1080307.html
Modern Art Blitz Interview by Mat Gleason (with JK Russ): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjLaB8oUopI
‘From Dust to Water’ interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MQOsnSbpBE&t=8s

Credits:

Photographs © the artist, courtesy of PAULNACHE
Installation photographs will be uploaded the day after the exhibition officially opens.
Photography by Thomas Marroni, Thomas P Teutenberg