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The Hole is pleased to present Staggered Paintings, our seventh solo exhibition with British artist Matthew Stone. After debuting a single painting in his 2023 exhibition that was produced with a custom machine capable of depositing pigment into textured, impasto surfaces, Stone returns with a full show that expands this approach. Understanding painting as a technology in its own right and one that is inextricably linked with contemporary digital imaging tools, Stone travelled to New York to create this new body of work at Matr Labs in Red Hook, where MIT artists and engineers have come together to build innovative tools and tech. By leveraging computer simulation and advanced printing systems, this new process results in traditional oil paintings with the artist’s hand at every stage of the process.

These nine candle-lit paintings depicting whirling dancing figures are built through countless overlapping stages, where each layer reuses and subjectively transforms the last. These steps of mediation and representation of the means by which they are constructed (brushstrokes painted and then simulated over and over) blur traditionally discrete methodologies while depicting somatically engaged bodies in shared flow. Painted brushstrokes are photographed, cut out and mapped onto digital figures, reworked in simulation, printed into a hand-rendered oil ground with custom machinery, and then painted into by hand again, then repeat, repeat, repeat. Each stage folds into the next, so that traces of every previous image merge and remain encoded within the surface of the oil.

This looping constitutes a self-generating system of image-making: each layer reproduces the conditions of its own emergence by embedding one mode of image production within another. The representational apparatus turns back on itself, so that the means of depiction are depicted again, creating a feedback loop between the act of representing and what is represented. What results is not a skeuomorphic image of “painting” or just a painting of an image, but painting as an iterative mediation, a relational matrix of index and simulation, made up of gestural residue and computational projection.

Stone asks us to “consider these paintings as proposals for visual literacy under present conditions”. They stage how simulation and material co-author perception in digital image culture. He asks that we slow the scroll into a gaze that can register both the mark and the system that carries it. Suggesting that painting can acknowledge its own inevitable digital mediation and maintain a precise, intentional use of it, proposing therefore an ethics of attention, through which we can become more conscious of how powerfully images still move us, think with and for us, and remake how we see.

“I wanted to communicate that these are paintings that are self aware of the time that they have come into existence.”

Always exploring and poking at the forefront of new technology, Stone tries to move beyond it as spectacle. When he first debuted his scanned brush stroke, enhanced dimensionality figures in 2016 the “how’d he do that” dominated their reception and indeed they were technically dazzling. But a decade on, even amidst innovating further with the tools of design and production, Stone focuses on the emotive potential and the mysterious new aesthetic harmonies that emerge as opposed to the sharp new edges of the tech. Matthew emphasizes a desire to recreate the feeling of confusion as to the nature of the contemporary image but with an orientation towards the light. This impulse connects back to his first solo exhibition at the gallery, Optimism as Cultural Rebellion (2011), where Ken Johnson of The New York Times observed that Stone’s work proposed “a new mystically inspired choreography of how to be human” a sentiment that now finds renewed form in the dancing, interlaced bodies of these paintings.

Matthew Stone (b. 1982, London, England) is a multimedia artist whose work combines the particularities of the artist’s hand with the possibilities of digital construction. His paintings have been exhibited extensively both in the United States and abroad, both in galleries and at institutions, including Fiorucci Foundation (Stromboli, Italy), The National Museum of Photography, The Royal Library (Copenhagen, Denmark), Fotografiemuseum (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK), Tate Britain (London, UK), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow, Scotland) and Jeju Museum of Art (Jeju City, South Korea). He has exhibited with The Hole since 2011. Solo shows with the gallery include AI Paintings (2023) Optimism as Cultural Rebellion (2011), Love Focused Like a Laser (2012), Unconditional Love (2012), NEOPHYTE (2018), Together (2020) and A Portrait of the Artist in the Metaverse (2021). He holds a BA in Painting from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts of London.