Splendours Shaken to Earth
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
Splendours Shaken to Earth, 2018
Silkscreen and acrylic on canvas
240 x 630 cm
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
Installation view: Abundant Futures. Works from the TBA21 Collection, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A, Córdoba, Spain, 2022
Photo: Roberto Ruiz
- Date
- 2019
- Medium
- Silkscreen and acrylic on canvas
- Dimension
- 240 x 630 x 3.5 cm
- Credit
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
- This artwork is part of the donation and long-term loan from TBA21 to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Details
Embracing the formal and symbolic potential of different mediums and techniques, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy works in painting, printmaking, ceramics, and poetry, informed by his background in theater and choreography. Queer and collaborative practices, often mixed with performative interventions, are evoked on the canvases and treated as a field for negotiating relationship between visual and textual elements in constant flux.
Splendors Shaken to Earth draws its title from a line from the poem “Atlantis” by postwar American writer Robert Duncan. In this large-format canvas, a large curved element dominates the surface, crossed by grand brushstrokes in acrylic paint. The curvatures signal a shape-shifting world, a marker to spatialize constant flows and movement as possibilities of creation and invention. The swirling lines painted in different hues of blue on the white background alternate with washes of yellow and orange, combined with watery strokes of red and pink. In this abstract and yet atmospheric composition, Lutz-Kinoy layers the text of Duncan’s poem, screen-printed in red on the upper part of the painting and repeated eight times throughout the length of the canvas, dealt with almost as a page.
The past and future are
full of disasters, splendors
shaken to earth, seas rising to overshadow
shores and roaring in.
The lines echo a sense of grief and longing for a past that has been submerged, yet not forgotten, but re-emerging through the seas, a figure of time and its recursive cycles of destruction and creation. Transcribing “Atlantis” directly on the canvas, Lutz-Kinoy experiments with lyrical processes such as fragmentation and montage as techniques for diversifying language and reinventing approaches to composition and literary creation. Brought onto the canvas, the words re-signify the brushstrokes, suggesting movements of waves and vortices, constantly assembling and dissolving matter.
(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Abundant Futures", C3A, Córdoba, 2022)