PAINTINGS

“BRINGING HOME A STRANGER” AUGUST 2018

With Minter’s Grand Guignol reality principle at play (sex/death/horror/satire), these images are not brutal so much as they are about the brutal world, even a parody of the brutal world. What seems like shock value does have a value beyond shock. He presents images, narratives within the images, that beg the viewer to ask what is happening here, what is going on within the surfaces, and why.

“FANTOMAS AND A BODY” MARCH 2018

If we pull the camera back from the framing of the image in the art and see ourselves looking at it, we can ask these questions, shirk from them, or maybe look in the mirror, adjust our makeup and continue to delude ourselves or not that we, the viewers are not, in fact, the perpetrators, the monsters.

“FINDING YOUR FRIENDS” SEPTEMBER 2017

There is no repression or oppression at work in Minter’s art, but rather depictions of the violent exploding of repression or oppression, in fact, a manner of going all the way in to come out the other side, free from bondage, what William Blake called the “mind-forg’d manacles.” Matt Minter is asking us to see clearly before us our own demons, our own nightmares, our own traumas, our own shadow selves, and we must question whether we really are the agents or the victims of whom or what we might think ourselves to be. To put it country simple: he is asking us to see ourselves.
—Written by J.T. Dockery