John Crash Matos — Study in Watercolors — Addict Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 14 → June 2, 2012

Do we still have to present John Crash Matos, this street artist pioneer, born in Bronx in 1961, who undertakes, at the age of 13, to popularize his mark on the trains of New York ?

As a consequence of his fame, Addict Galerie shows him for the fourth time, who, in order to not let get himself locked in graffiti art, will express himself on canvas since 1978. This boldness allows him to give back his nobleness to Street Art from his first big exhibition “Graffiti art success”. For the first time, both the public and critics took Urban Art seriously.

Passing from train to cymas, Crash mixed with the greatest (Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring at the Real Art Ways gallery) and gave birth to post-graffiti.
Since then, from the Museum of Modern Art of Paris to the New York’s MoMA or to the Groningen Museum in Netherland, Crash continues to display his innovations brilliantly. He learned how to try out new ideas, though he stayed loyal to his options with an unceasing research of conciseness and synthesis. His flair keeps evolving to the essential simplification, the dazzling asceticism. For him, trying out new ideas is going into deep by evacuating the superfluous from his canvas, the embellishment that would darken the senses, as the wrongfully simplistic reasoning of Matisse.

As a proof of uniqueness and power, Crash’s artworks are recognizable at the first glance.

With « Study in Watercolors », Addict Galerie offers a selection of preliminary studies, freshly achieved by John Crash Matos. Little shown in France thus far, these watercolors enlighten the latest work by the artist.

Beyond the preparatory sketch, the unfinished try, these pieces reveal with ease how Crash synthesizes with an uncommon acuteness urban and pop cultures. Comics, mangas, hip-hop, science fiction, TV products, graphism, this unconnected flood of pictures by our society, Crash condenses it all in a pictorial expression organized according to the sampling principle.

The plastic possibilities peculiar to the watercolor allow Crash to paint sophistificated dazzling chromatic shades. In an audacious way, the artist writes in retightened frames bits and pieces of letters and faces with the fact that the eye, at any time, would give up its haunting presence, associate mark to Roy Lichtenstein. But, in his case, the small folio is not linked with imprisonment. On the contrary, it invites to grasp the dynamic of the impeded lines casting themselves out of the frame.

The number of the exhibited pieces shows, if needed, that Crash has lost nothing from his frenzy to paint for almost 40 years. The watercolor technique allows him to express, in kind of a pressing way, all its inventive energy.

With this exhibition dedicated to Crash from April 14th to the June 2nd 2012, Addict Galerie brings to light the sketch, the preliminary work of graffiti, which the aspect often relegated to the background to a mode of expression sometimes assimilated to a spontaneous blowout of the artist’s imagination. The recognition of street art also passes by this return to basic.