Billis Williams Gallery is pleased to present MATT CONDRON the gallery’s second solo exhibition by the Los Angeles-based painter. The exhibition opens with a reception on May 9th and continues through June 6th.
Matt Condron’s paintings are about sharing the artist’s experience – about emotion, about interpretation, about the sense of a place. At first glance the paintings might seem to be of the Photorealism genre. On further inspection, we see that these paintings exist in a world in and of themselves. The photographs the paintings are based on are the starting point – not the end goal.
Matt Condron’s paintings are of between moments – spaces inhabited only by light. They are snapshots of a juncture of time and location – they are perfected snapshots. Condron is not including every details – he is editing and substitute and crafting – choosing what to include to convey the sense that he wants the viewer to take away.
Condron’s oil paintings pair precise skill with a deeply technical understanding of what he calls the ‘alchemy’ of color mixing. Mixing his own paints gives Condron enormous control over the nuance and mood of his paintings. The subject matter is industrial but the paintings are grounded in richly terrestrial tones intersected by light.
There is a nostalgia, a calm, a stillness to Condron’s work. The sense of time suspended. Are we in a lull ? Or the tranquillity that comes before? Where are the people who should be jubilantly fill these spaces? Is this after-hours or the end of the world? Are we between things are after the end of all things? The unknown narrative activates the paintings – gives them a life of their own. Their story is the unknowable and the everyday. It is the story that we as viewers bring to these places. The paintings become a set for our own musings to wander.
Matt Condron (b. 1967, Simi Valley, CA) has exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, OR, Boston, New York and his work has been published in The Boston Globe Magazine (Critic’s Pick, July, 2010), The Artist’s Magazine, OTCT Crier, The Artist’s Magazine, Riviera Magazine, American Art Collector, and New American Paintings. He currently lives and works in Portland, OR.
