Matthew Couper is an Aotearoa / New Zealand-born artist living and working in the USA. His art over the past twenty-five years mined western Art History practices ranging from early Italian Renaissance to Spanish and Mexican Baroque.
The artist lives in the Mojave Desert and has recently been looking back to the seclusion and isolation of the Pacific - especially in a post-Covid world. Conflations are formed between his ‘here and now’.
‘Couper is an artist with a Kafkaesque view of the world’ - Californian art critic John Seed
His art, spurred on by hostile desert dwelling, oscillate between didactic talismans of impending anthropocenic doom to more insular and psychological spaces. Paintings describe desert mesa psycho-scapes and murky sea-surrounded islands, presided over hovering tools of survival and make-shift shelter, all while reveling in aesthetic constructive chaos. This psychological space, both in the artist’s mind and on the painted surface, is the opposite of a specific location. They are an amalgam of places past and present - vistas of a homemade paradise constantly in flux.
Much like Couper’s homeland set on the Pacific Ring of Fire, even the islands and headlands are subject to change, distortion and relocation due to continuing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The term ‘desert island’ reconnects his two homes back together in paint.