Our Broken Hero Painting

From official website: "Matt Bray's abstracted figures draw upon personal feelings of alienation, using expressionist techniques to engage with the human body. Bray's paintings occupy and explore the tensions between subject and object, figuration and abstraction and allow the paint to exist on its own terms. Being and Nothingness brings together key works to date, from dark forlorn heroes and expressive portraits to a more fragmented figure. Colourful sic-fi inspired canvases see the figure transformed and form the subject for Bray's immediate and impactful approach to painting" [Allison Young] -------------------------------------------------------------- Extracts from the interpretation essay for the exhibition 'Being and Nothingness', written by eminent art historian Edward Lucie-Smith: How is one to place the work of Matt Bray, a young painter who represents a new generation of artists now emerging here in Britain, who have grown weary of the conceptual dogma of the previous generation. Since just past the middle of the 20th century, new groups of artists have regularly emerged here in Britain, in non-metropolitan settings often receiving scant justice from London-based critics. Though Matt Bray eschews any link with these groups, his work is, I think, best considered by looking at it against the kind of background they provide. What Matt - and artists of his generation - are proposing is that classic Modernism of the early 20th century offers things to which art should now return. He declares that his primary interest is "the meeting ground between abstraction and figuration." This means that he can be regarded as being not only post-Kandinsky, but also as post the Abstract Expressionism that saw a complete dissolution of fixed forms. Bray says, "When I began painting I was not an image maker, but rather I just slopped paint around, interested in the material itself and the effects it created through chance, gravity etc., though that quickly became boring and the figure crept into my work and has remained ever since." The High Modernist artists he most readily reminds one of in his single-figure paintings are the first generation of German Expressionists. Recently, however, Bray has been experimenting with subject-material that seems, certainly at first sight, to have little connection with the past: "Images of androids and aliens; Star Trek has been my main depository of characters." He adds.