Pedro Matos has been jet­ting around the world exhibit­ing in excit­ing low­brow spaces. His work has adorned the walls of Carmichael Gallery in Los Ange­les, Art El Gallery in Bris­tol UK, and The Mon­tana Shop and Gallery in his native Lis­bon, Por­tu­gal. Matos has already made sev­eral stops in San Fran­cisco, show­ing in group exhi­bi­tions at White Walls and 941 Geary. Now, the young artist pre­pares for his solo debut in North Amer­ica with “Ephemera”, an exhi­bi­tion of new works at the Shoot­ing Gallery.

The gallery shares; “The works fea­tured in Ephemera are the newest iter­a­tion of Matos’ mas­ter­ful oil-​on-​canvas explo­rations, fea­tur­ing a com­plex lay­er­ing of tex­ture, pat­tern and por­trai­ture. He col­lects inspi­ra­tion from a vari­ety of sources, and pho­tographs peo­ple, places, and aes­thetic details to pull from for his fin­ished works. Matos’ new can­vases are a result of the piling-​up of things he is drawn to, torn-​up, remixed, and given the appear­ance of ripped paper – set to mimic the aes­thetic of worn, shred­ded posters pasted to the side of a build­ing. Through this visual lan­guage, Matos hopes to pull the viewer into a con­ver­sa­tion sur­round­ing imper­ma­nence, and the con­stant shift­ing of social, polit­i­cal, moral, cul­tural and aes­thetic ideas.”

His inves­ti­ga­tion of life’s ephemeral nature has led him to cre­ate a body of work that vividly jux­ta­poses beauty with decay, some­thing he encoun­ters daily in con­tem­po­rary urban spaces. The pat­tern­ing he uti­lizes in these works comes directly from tra­di­tional Por­tuguese designs, lay­ered with adver­tise­ments from the street, ren­dered metic­u­lously in bright oil paint. For Ephemera, the artist plans to present approx­i­mately 8 orig­i­nal paint­ings, in addi­tion to some brand-​new instal­la­tion work. Under­neath it all, Matos works with por­trai­ture based on sub­jects that lie out­side of what pop­u­lar cul­ture craves: instead of mod­els, celebri­ties or cul­tural icons, he works to rep­re­sent the kind of peo­ple he reg­u­larly encoun­ters. Fam­ily mem­bers, peo­ple that are a part of his imme­di­ate com­mu­nity, per­son­al­i­ties encoun­tered out in the streets, and other sub­jects that fall in this same vein. The for­got­ten, the over­looked, the under­ap­pre­ci­ated mem­bers of soci­ety all take prece­dence here, where the slick tran­sience of adver­tis­ing cul­ture fails to do any­thing more than fade away with very lit­tle time.”

Tags: ephemera, explorations, featured, Pedro Matos, San Francisco, Shooting Gallery

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2011 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Art.
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