Matthew Smith




Matthew Smith, Butter, 2002


November 08 - December 15, 2002

 

The British artist Matthew Smith (born 1976) is exhibiting as part of Gallery Swap London-Berlin 2002 three video works and four watercolors that were made during his stay in Berlin this past summer. The works are concerned with the differences between artificial landscape clichés produced by advertising and real places.

 

The video works show excerpted “landscape cartoons” taken from food packing from Berlin supermarkets that appear like stage curtains before the real park landscapes of the Jungfernheide Park, the Viktoriapark, and the Shillerpark . In the movement of the clouds and of the noises of the urban park, the fiction of the “cartoon” is refracted in the real time of the worldly park landscape. The idyll of the village landscape as a vehicle for the sale of products evokes in the viewer/purchaser an illusion of the untainted world just around the corner that Matthew Smith links with the urban atmosphere of the city.

 

The theme of the video works is continued in the drawings: the artificial pictorial world of the supermarket becomes the motif for traditional landscape watercolors.