Matthew Stollar

Middlesex University : BA Hons(June 2002)

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Critical Analysis:


Matthew Stollar's work springs from photographs taken whilst in Poland in 2001. The paintings hang not as individuals but as a physically connected group offering a visual plane that has associations with public murals and tapestry.

However the public mural is subverted and the figures portrayed disintegrate into rigorous paintwork and disquieting text. One feels that Stollar's work acts as a mixing bowl the ingredients of which he pulls from the everyday and the chance effects of the painting process. However behind his stoic salute to the human condition lies a pathos-ridden desperatism, a frank questioning that leaves the viewer feeling uneasy.

Stollar is very interested in people's belief systems. This questioning is apparent not only literally in the work but is mirrored in the aggressive deconstruction of the autonomous painting.The whole gallery is over run by a clearly obsessive desire to express and yet on one painting are the words 'I live on the moon'; maybe just a figure of speech or perhaps the true belief of a patient.

Stollar offers heroic paintings that draw liberally from the past century's painterly vocabulary. Some of the problems he deals with aesthetically could almost be called classical problems. In the melting pot of his arena it is as if he has drawn in a strand from every area of painterly interest and left them all dissected in the visible inner workings of his painting process. Somehow this jumbling together of disparate enthusiasms work together and they produce a style and outlook that is both epic and powerful and also comic and colloquial.

One feels the journey of his life and the journey that his painting is taking are one and the same. If this first garbled yet strong first offering is anything to go by it seems that Stollar is headed in an interesting direction.


Matthew Stollar

Middlesex University : BA Hons(June 2002)

For sales, commissions and to send comments to the artist.

 

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