Matthew Stone: Back into the Body

There are three obvious layers to Matthew Stone’s work in 'Back into the Body' : what we see, how it’s made, and where it comes from.

What do we see? Figures surround the gallery, all at the same imposing, more-than-life-sized scale. The evident fact that they are partly composed from swatches of paint, together with the apparent gaps in the bodies and the way neighboring figures intertwine with each other ambiguate their reception. Is there a photographic source? Do they derive from live models? Is any of the paint real? Are they fighting, dancing or loving? How many are there? Whose limb is that? We are drawn into questions.

How are they made? The production process is complex. Stone starts from generic computer-generated figures which he can pose and manipulate with a degree of control not easily achieved by other means: it’s simple to alter a viewpoint, to reverse a decision, to edit a person in and out. These template figures are the ground for brush strokes from Stone’s ongoing library, originally made by painting on acetate and photographing the strokes at high resolution. Those strokes can be applied to the 3D renderings of bodies, so that they appear contoured or shadowed to wrap around the flesh, or applied to shapes rendered as extensions of the bodies in the digital space. The bodies or shapes onto which the paint is applied can then be digitally removed, leaving the paint interacting with the implied presence of what is now absent. That causes the elisions, increasing the fragmentation of bodies and the number of transitional ‘edges of paint’. That knowledge helps us to understand what we are seeing, but does less to suggest why the artist wants us to see it. For that, I think, we need to go back into Stone’s history.

So, where does the work come from? Formally, Stone has consistently sought to generate representations of the body – literally ‘figurative’ work – which he can accept as forward-looking rather than embarrassing in an art historical context. Thus his instinct when photographing people in performance was to push the images towards abstraction through how their bodies combined in reality, and were cropped in photographic presentation.