Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Matt Connors: Freely Espousing. This is Connors’ first solo exhibition.
Connors makes small-scale abstract paintings in homage to modernism. He considers the paintings pictorial representations of fascination. The material aspects of the paintings are what manifest themselves most clearly: quality of line, color palette and paint application. Through idiosyncratic formal decisions he embraces and at the same time calls into question Clement Greenberg’s tenet that the medium of painting is irreducible and pictorial representation actually obfuscates essential meaning.
While Connors paintings riff on postwar abstraction and modernist painting styles, his work asserts that abstract painting today transcends the self-referential. For Connors, emulating the effects of other artistic disciplines, like poetry, music and film, is equally important and inspiring when making a painting.
The title of the exhibition is taken from James Schuyler’s poem, Freely Espousing, written in 1969. Schuyler’s conversational and elegiac style, with its quick shifts in sound, shape and color, give the poem the effect of a collage. Like Schuyler’s poetry, Connors disparate presentation of elements and the resulting imagery evokes the mood of a moment and the objects of his desire.
Matt Connors received his BFA from Bennington College in 1995. He is currently an MFA candidate at Yale University.
For further information or images, please contact Jeff Bailey at 212.989.0156 or jeff@baileygallery.com