Artists - CVZ Contemporary

Matt Jones (b. 1979) came of age in the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York. In 2003 he received his BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI. Subsequent to his graduation from RISD, he has aggressively continued to pursue multiple creative endeavors ranging from surface design for interiors to his better-known body of large abstract landscape paintings.

From an early age Jones has shown an acute sensitivity and reception to the psychological implications that one's surrounding physical landscape offers. The correlation he draws between what is felt internally with where one resides externally is a primary theme of his stemming from early years spent in a charged yet isolated landscape.

M. Jones currently resides and works in Brooklyne, New York.

Having grown up surrounded by farms at the foot of the Berkshires in upstate New York, it was almost predetermined that I would develop a deep connection to landscape/space. My past five years have become characterized by traveling from this rural life to urban spaces and back again. Out of this travel occurs heavy change, where the urban is alluding to a contemporary life and the rural to tradition or a lack of change.

It is the rhythms of light and space that dominate my visual world and allow me to reinvent the process of seeing day by day. The landscape, I believe, offers the individual a religious interaction of constant change within a lighted abstraction of space from which it radiates. These ideas of space are not just the physical that surrounds, but encompass the subtleties of the abstract, social and internal space. Within the organic qualities of space exist the rhythms of life in and outside of the repetitious birth of degeneration/creation. What could offer more to a visual language and the religion of the rhythms of seeing?

The current series of work appeals to the unconscious nature of seeing space or more specifically the subtleties of life and abstraction. The linear structure of layers within the present work becomes an analogy for the collected experience of space/land as witnessed visually and experienced physically and mentally. Both the structures of fields, roads and buildings are reduced to basic spatial qualities and extracted out of the memory of compiled space. Thus it is in this way that the work becomes a collective measurement of seeing and one's abstracted memory of the interaction of light.

Varying levels of duality and the physical doubling of things also plays an important role in this work. Duality is to be found in almost everything in nature and its self is almost an analogy for life. I rest on the duality between the structure of the cube/building and its organic environmental space, the duality of both states of consciousness, the duality of the real and natural versus that which is created, and the duality of sight itself.

One reference I continually make in these current paintings is of the cube. It becomes a basic form of all man-made structures and in its generalized form; it is a measurement of it. It is also an analogy for the art world and contemporary life constructed within it. When this containment is juxtaposed with the anti-compositional rhythmic compilation of spatial planarity, which is also a form of measurement, what exists is a representation of myself with the dealings of duality and opposites.

EDUCATION
2003   Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI
BFA, Painting
Brown University, Liberal Arts

GROUP SHOWS
2004   Inside/out 229Brown gallery, Philadelphia PA
2003   Group Show, Woods Gerry Gallery, Providence RI
Select Invitational, Woods Gerry Gallery, Providence RI
Gen-next, Peck Street Gallery, Providence RI
2002   Arts in Collective, Peck Street Gallery, Providence RI
1999   Annual Juried Art Show, Columbia Greene Community College, Hudson NY
New York State Assembly Group Show, Albany NY

COMMISSIONS
2001   Land Dock, Permanent installation, Design Industries, Inc.
Copake, NY