Baronian Xippas presents the first solo show in Belgium of Matthew Porter (1975, Pennsylvania, USA). The exhibition is organized in two parts and allows the visitor to discover the many facets of his artistic practice. Photographs from different series are on display: his most recent prints and older images in the space located at 33 rue de la Concorde.
Montages, overlays, multiple exposures – Matthew Porter’s work takes experimentations from old and new technologies to explore the possibilities of building and manipulating the image.
The hanging at 2 rue Isidore Verheyden brings together photographs from his series “flying cars” and a new series inspired by the news.
In the large-format photographs of the series of “flying cars”, Matthew Porter staged bolides frozen in the open air as if they were flying over streets or crossing intersections of highways of American cities. These images seem straight out of a remake of Starsky and Hutch or Pulp Fiction. The artist plays on clichés and reimagines the cult scenes of chases of movies or television series from the 70s-80s. Both surreal and offbeat, these improbable images use digital retouching and are a fine tribute to the cinema. “The Heights”, a monograph dedicated to the series was recently published by Aperture (2019).
Influenced by the troubled times in which we live, other smaller photographs thwart the casual atmosphere and nostalgic iconography of the series of “flying cars”. Matthew Porter says he was inspired by the news to realize this new series. “The images of walls, fences and barbed wire are part of our media cycle, at the time of the debate on immigration and the migration crisis in the southern United States. The clichés recall the atmosphere of a film noir and focus on certain details and relationships: people on the phone, passers-by crossing the street, fences, etc.
The exhibition continues in the second space (33 rue de la Concorde) with older color photographs and a series of black and white photographs taken in the studio of the father of Matthew Porter, a sculptor influenced by the modernist influence. The black and white prints are about the debris of making the works and the “leftovers” of unused materials come to life in front of the lens. Matthew Porter immortalizes these carefully arranged constructions with his camera and works by multiple exposures. Under the effect of light, objects are transformed and evoke new associations: a mirror reflects an almost invisible out-of-field, a bleached metal dazzles us, and shadows almost black create areas of absolute emptiness, like a kind of dizziness in the picture. Matthew Porter emphasizes the relationship between modernity and tradition, painting and photography. The aesthetics of this series evokes the utopian cities or Bauhaus buildings.
Matthew Porter’s artistic practice is polymorphic and his photographs are often imbued with multiple historical and cultural references. Disparate elements coexist in these compositions, whether within the same image or from one image to another within a sequence of carefully edited photographs.
Matthew Porter – Scenic
Baronian Xippas
2 rue Isidore Verheyden & 33 rue de la Concorde
B-1050 Brussels
www.baronianxippas.com
