Exhibition Review: Matthew Stone
© Matthew Stone, Courtesy of the Artist and The Hole (2021)
Written by Nick Rutolo
A Portrait of the Artist in the Metaverse by Matthew Stone is an exploration into one of the most lucrative and adventurous modern digital spaces: turning physical paintings into digital rights. Glass-textured brush strokes and digital integration serve a unique experience that brings life to static images. Rare techniques accompanied with new ideas create an experience only justified in person, leaving a lasting experience that inspires expression in both our physical world and online personas.
Stone puts on a very different show from what a typical exhibition gives. Its physical copies are only loosely physical; each and every small painting is accompanied with a digital experience. In a tall, wide and long room, recognizably portraiture paintings are mutated and twisted into cartoonish versions of people and animals. The work is incredibly photorealistic, which is why the distortion of each image is astounding: Even the unrealistic parts look natural. There’s this perfect duality between realism and imagination that mirrors the internalization of experiences and emotions.
© Matthew Stone, Courtesy of the Artist and The Hole (2021)
© Matthew Stone, Courtesy of the Artist and The Hole (2021)
Stone explains his work as a dedication to what he’s learned over the past year. Each image tells a story — they're hard to make out, but with enough time and an open mind, the unnatural parts of the paintings feel the most real. The distortions become a means of expression, representing Stone’s understanding of who or what he is portraying.
© Matthew Stone, Courtesy of the Artist and The Hole (2021)
Alongside this wall of paintings is a large composite painting that brings the narrative together, placing characters from the other paintings in dynamic poses. The figures are surrounded with structures that have distinct shapes but no discernible details, mostly resembling doorways and tables. The image looks like the creation of a 3D animation studio, but clear brushstrokes speak to its true nature. This composite painting is accompanied by a few screens with the image on them, but these representations are moving, breathing and living compared to the physical counterpart. Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous dolly zoom (popularized in Vertigo and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws), it attempts to zoom in and pull away at the same time. These screens show the potential to animate still images, incentivizing artists and consumers alike to represent physical work digitally, creating something new and exciting that we’ve never been able to experience before.
© Matthew Stone, Courtesy of the Artist and The Hole (2021)
Stone’s paintings are available for purchase and come with a non-fungible token, commonly known as an NFT — a bit of code that digitally serializes the painting and makes it into a one-of-a-kind and non-reproducible image. Stone suggests that buyers use his paintings as profile photos, a common practice with other NFT artwork. This trend was inspired by CryptoPunks, a unique set of 10,000 popular digital avatars that put NFTs on the map in 2017.
Accompanying artwork with a dive into a barely explored commercial territory is risky, but it has the potential to pay off. Not everyone is going to catch on to the NFT trend, but some have already sold for incredibly high prices over their relatively short period of existence. Coupling physical work with a unique digital print opens a new door for consumers. Not only do they get the traditional physical copy, but they also get ownership over the art’s digital presence. This opens a whole new market for art.
© Matthew Stone, Courtesy of the Artist and The Hole (2021)
A Portrait of the Artist in the Metaverse can be viewed at The Hole from now until October 10. Stone’s other work can be viewed at matthewstone.co.uk and on Instagram at @matthewstoneart.
