Matthew Musgrave | Oil Shale

17th October – 8th November | Private View 16th October 2009 6-9pm

For it’s final exhibition in the 2009 programme Supplement present paintings by
Matthew Musgrave.

Each painting entails a series of different approaches accumulated over numerous
sittings. In this period the works are left open for as long as possible, put aside and
returned to, eliciting doubt and experimentation. Their construction is analogous to
assemblage; gathering a wealth of strategies that sit in dialogue upon the support.
The paintings appear as amulets, stones or rock-formations that have weathered and
gathered moss: a function of the paint’s materiality and application. They have a
velvety or shard-like appearance that entices the viewer to excavate each tiny fissure
of their intensely worked surface.

Musgrave is concerned with the slowing-down of the work’s encounter. As such the
works resist direct readings and gradually reveal themselves over time. In this they
respond to the specificity of paintings of this scale; the problematic demand of their
physical size and their potential to engage the phenomenological shift of perception
that operates through the distance at which they are seen.

Within the exhibition space the paintings are installed with sensitivity to weight and
rhythm, demanded by the irregular shape of the supports. They hang gracefully off-
centre producing tension and specific spacious relationships that reverberate within the
gallery’s internal architecture.

Fragments of paint, gathered and collected from studio debris, form the artist’s
Supplement.