Matthew Clifford Green

Planes taking off

Space to contemplate at each stop

Dream states of place

An eye in an ocean

On a face

The body in space

The picture is a potion

It begins with a notion

And documents emotion

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present An Eye in an Ocean, the first New York solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Matthew Clifford Green.

In this suite of new works, Green continues his exploration of intuitively painted canvases that mine universal emotional states. Composed of crudely applied layers of paint — achieved by squeezing on, scraping across, and piling up — the paintings’ thick impasto surfaces flirt with both abstract pattern and rudimentary figuration. The pictures portray a cast of raw characters that populate various psychologically charged, often isolated environments, which build their own hallucinatory narratives. Swinging from joyous scenes to ones of introspection or alienation, the works display a wide spectrum of emotion. In nestling the human figure in a field of discordantly vibrant color and pattern, Green constructs highly textured surfaces that vibrate with deep emotive activity.

Matthew Clifford Green has had solo exhibitions at Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR; Secret Recipe, Los Angeles, CA; 2nd Cannons, Los Angeles, CA; Lawrimore Project, Seattle, WA; Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR; and ROCKSBOXFINEART, Portland, OR. This past year his work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at Half Gallery, New York, NY and Capital Gallery, San Francisco, CA.