Matthew Clifford Green
Waiting for the Ice Cream to Melt
July 10–August 23, 2015
Certain pleasures are reserved for people who identify as painters, but the most enviable might be the satisfaction of squeezing an entire tube of paint onto a surface. When squeezing paint from the tube it can be hard to delineate the wiggling coil of pigment emerging as either playful or grotesque; resembling more the trail of celebratory streamers or a prehistoric slime. Once applied to a surface it can be far easier to tell if the painting is playful or grotesque — though this is a distinction Waiting for the Ice Cream to Melt doesn’t provide a ready answer to.
On his canvasses Matthew Clifford Green expends the material of oil paint in a nearfacetious way, creating works that border the monstrous with the cartoonish. As the surface of his works mound and extend off the canvas, the act of viewership becomes tactile despite its distance, blending sight with touch. The crudeness of Green’s painting style results in works that bend the formal nature of color and the oil medium towards the realm of hyper simplicity, while carefully dodging the fine line of affected naivety.
Birthed of Green’s unplanned process, each of the works conveys a different world of subconscious imagery, populated with unrefined characters of fantasy. Ranging in different levels of figurative detail, faces abstracted into smileys that at times include arms and bodies, the subjects of his work manifest the barest and most crucial aspects of humanity, human form, and simple guttural expression.
Matthew Clifford Green is an artist based in Los Angeles whose solo exhibitions include Naive Dream Express, Secret Recipe (Los Angeles, CA); Young Male Painter, 2nd Cannons (Los Angeles); Excitable Boy, Lawimore Projects, Seattle, WA); Circle Jerk, Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR) and Hunks and Punks, ROCKSBOXFINEART (Portland, OR.) Green has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including Flowers in the Hot Tub, Artist Curated Projects (Los Angeles, CA); The International Invitational Triennial of Contemporary Wind Chimes, ROCKSBOXFINEART, (Portland, OR); Looks on Paper, Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR); Dark: A show to winter (Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR.)
Waiting for the Ice Cream to Melt
July 10–August 23, 2015
Certain pleasures are reserved for people who identify as painters, but the most enviable might be the satisfaction of squeezing an entire tube of paint onto a surface. When squeezing paint from the tube it can be hard to delineate the wiggling coil of pigment emerging as either playful or grotesque; resembling more the trail of celebratory streamers or a prehistoric slime. Once applied to a surface it can be far easier to tell if the painting is playful or grotesque — though this is a distinction Waiting for the Ice Cream to Melt doesn’t provide a ready answer to.
On his canvasses Matthew Clifford Green expends the material of oil paint in a nearfacetious way, creating works that border the monstrous with the cartoonish. As the surface of his works mound and extend off the canvas, the act of viewership becomes tactile despite its distance, blending sight with touch. The crudeness of Green’s painting style results in works that bend the formal nature of color and the oil medium towards the realm of hyper simplicity, while carefully dodging the fine line of affected naivety.
Birthed of Green’s unplanned process, each of the works conveys a different world of subconscious imagery, populated with unrefined characters of fantasy. Ranging in different levels of figurative detail, faces abstracted into smileys that at times include arms and bodies, the subjects of his work manifest the barest and most crucial aspects of humanity, human form, and simple guttural expression.
Matthew Clifford Green is an artist based in Los Angeles whose solo exhibitions include Naive Dream Express, Secret Recipe (Los Angeles, CA); Young Male Painter, 2nd Cannons (Los Angeles); Excitable Boy, Lawimore Projects, Seattle, WA); Circle Jerk, Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR) and Hunks and Punks, ROCKSBOXFINEART (Portland, OR.) Green has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including Flowers in the Hot Tub, Artist Curated Projects (Los Angeles, CA); The International Invitational Triennial of Contemporary Wind Chimes, ROCKSBOXFINEART, (Portland, OR); Looks on Paper, Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR); Dark: A show to winter (Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR.)