Matthew Allen: Where You Go I Go Too

Overview

Liberating creativity from rational thought just as the colour field painters sought to destroy illusion, Matthew Allen’s forthcoming exhibition Where You Go I Go Too, offers a place of refuge at Sullivan+Strumpf Gallery. It is a painterly antidote to an increasingly detached and complex world.

In this exhibition, Allen celebrates the beauty of raw materiality and its formal qualities, stating: “I deem a work valid when there is an interplay between the tactility of surface and the depth of light, colour and space.” In this way, he is engaging with the gravitational flow of paint and the immersive experience generated by the aesthetic flatness of the canvas.

Allen's practice draws largely from the history of 20th century abstract expressionism and the theoretical domain of colour psychology. He aims to spark an epiphanic experience in the viewer, akin to the intentions of the melancholic colour-field pioneer Mark Rothko. He also seek to imbue his painting with a sense of mystic elusiveness, mediating between things verifiable and things unreachable.

Where You Go I Go Too invites the viewer to partake in an unearthing of truth, igniting the spirituality of painting as a physical action and paint as material substance.