Sirens & Lights (TAKSU Kuala Lumpur)

2009-04-16 19:00:00

Matthew Carver’s paintings immerse the viewer in an ‘unreal’ spatial vortex. His paint hits the canvas in luminous blips and trails, forming an illusory space rather than that of postcard propaganda or nostalgia. Its reverberation consumes the gallery with the energy of a tornado. Speed - and its counterpart technology - affect not just what we see, but how we see. This is the foundation to Carver’s painting and this new suite of works made for Malaysia - entitled “Sirens and Lights”.

While Carver’s paintings over the years have been informed by his movement between a palette of ‘exotic’ locations - Tokyo,
Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Kuala Lumpur and Las Vegas – these new paintings step beyond location per sé. Source material is morphed and sutured with a DJs sampling and the result has the pulse of now rather than where. They describe a post-Globalised-neo-Oriental nowhere that has a synergy with the homogeneity of immersive advertising. It is a constructed scape not so dissimilar to Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner with its crusty edges of crumbling capitalism and underbelly of anarchy, one that has a curious currency as we face today’s global economic crisis, a shattering if you like, of the world we know. Whilst an abstraction, Carver’s ocular judo is in sync with the fraying of this collective contemporary landscape.

We witness a shift through, and across, this exhibition. Carver is taking what he has perfected – a celebrated personal style
of Anamorphosis - and pushes it in new directions. This painting “Mongkok Siren”, at a hefty 200 x 300 cm, offers the point at which two directions meld: landscape and portraiture, a kind of contemporary compounding that he alludes to in the exhibition’s title, “Siren and Lights”. Simply said, the word ‘Siren’ conjures images of seductive and alluring vixens as well as the scream of emergency vehicles ricocheting between a city’s high-rise corridors, both warning of danger. Similarly, to be immortalised ‘up in lights’ has an odd parallel with the incandescent glow of a city that never sleeps, all surface glitter and mythology. The physical city is inseparable with its popularized, marketed image-scape and Carver has an uncanny ability to read and filter its menagerie.

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Location

17 Jalan Pawang
Keramat Hujung
54000 Kuala Lumpur

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Additional Info

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