Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present A Deeper Picture by Matthew Picton.
A Deeper Picture, Picton’s sixth exhibition with the gallery, builds on the artist’s creative trajectory. Drawing inspiration from David Hockney’s 2012 exhibition A Bigger Picture and anchored by the metaphysical films of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, Picton’s hand-cut sculptural assemblages for this exhibition weave together film stills with art-historical references and blueprints by French architect Paul Letarouilly. Through the use of color, pattern, and tactile dimension, Picton generates expansive scenes that offer seemingly infinite narrative paths.
Picton’s technique makes tangible the multidimensional bonds of communal history, personal memory, and artistic expression. Each layer retains autonomy while finding common ground with its neighbors. Picton’s skill and dedication in researching, selecting, and synthesizing material is such that the connections, once mapped, seem inevitable.
This approach is seen in works like Circus Maximus #2, where Picton translates the sensation of mass spectacle by incorporating Letarouilly drawings of the ancient Roman stadium, 18th-century etchings of the Colosseum by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and film stills from Federico Fellini’s 1972 Roma merged with Ridley Scott’s 2000 Gladiator.
The interplay of references continues with scenes from Tarkovsky’s titular film Nostalgia recurring throughout Picton’s wall sculptures, including No Great Masters, a title referencing the quote from the film’s protagonist, Domenico, “There are no great masters left. That’s the real evil of our time. The heart's path is covered in shadow.”
The monumental piece, Cathedral, also invites slow examination as it blends Nostalgia’s closing scene with Brueghel’s Flemish landscapes and Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Adoration of the Magi, transforming the Gothic Cologne Cathedral into a mirage of cut paper.
Picton translates Tarkovsky’s cinematic time and stream-of-consciousness narratives through physical constructions that synthesize human, religious, and geographical memory. In each sculptural assemblage, parallel acts of making and viewing create an exchange of engaged presence and constitute a communion with the stories that animate everything around us—a deeper picture waiting just below the surface.
