Francis Matthews: Ext/Int
Molesworth Gallery
by Aengus Woods
★★★★☆
There’s something endlessly perplexing about photorealist paintings. On the one hand their attraction is undeniable: viewers stand awestruck at the technical abilities and attention to detail evinced by its most skilful practitioners.
On the other a question immediately presents itself: why? Surely the job of representation is more than adequately achieved by the source photography itself. The viewer can only presume that, despite apparent commitments to pictorial fidelity, the artist is in fact searching for something else entirely.
Francis Matthews is in many ways a remarkable painter. For Ext/Int, his sixth solo show at Molesworth Gallery, he continues his meticulous oil-on-board explorations of the urban fabric – alleys, junctions, facades and boundaries – while also expanding inward with a series of four studies of domestic interiors.
All are similarly muted in tone, and there are instructive affinities to be found across his indoor and outdoor scenes. Kitchen, an interior viewed through and partially obscured by a patio door, echoes the obstructed vantage points presented in Sarsfield, Crumlin and New, while Newel, a quarter-turned view of a staircase landing shares a certain sense of liminality with Matthew’s four renderings of a traffic junction in Inchicore.
There’s a symmetry to the composition of the works that, even more so than the fidelity of the images, seems to point to their photographic origins. It is as if what is painted here are not so simply photographs but photographs that have been run through the full gamut of Photoshop adjustments or Instagram tweaks.
Perspectives are perfectly flattened, lines dead straight in parallel or perpendicular, compositions laid out with the gridded formality of a Poussin landscape or a Kubrick tracking shot.
Perhaps this is partly what Matthews is after. These are not lived perspectives. The paintings do not distinguish themselves from our seemingly incessant digital alterations of reality but instead seem to mimic them. His choice of tone and temperature – cool cinematic greys or halogen-bulb yellow – then starts to look less like painterly mood, as with the likes of Edward Hopper, and more like social-media filters – Juno, Crema, Oslo – operations that serve to imbue even our most mundane moments with a touch of main-character syndrome.
Even painterly gesture itself is kept to a minimum in these works. The only concession is the visibility of Matthew’s initial horizontal grounding brushstrokes, and these are laid with a symmetry and control that serve to paradoxically de-emphasise the painter’s hand.
Yet despite all that, it’s clear that Matthews does have at least one abiding painterly concern animating every work in the show: directional light and how it falls. His three views of Harbour Lane wonderfully trace the changing light raking a single location in different ways. But, finally, it is the painter’s evocations of evening street light hitting wet asphalt in Grattan and Inchicore I that steal the show.
Whether sunlight, streetlamp or traffic bollard, the drama of these works, such as it is, is the drama of how surfaces radiate and reflect, regardless of who is there to see it.
Francis Matthews: Ext/Int is at the Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, until Thursday, April 23rd
