Process Colour Series No.3 (Portrait of Time Square)

charcoal powder, oil paint, acrylic paint on wood, DVD and clamp light. 2006 Installation view: Hunter College New York, presented for the final seminar tutorial group class with Susan Crile.

Shadow Play: An Analysis of Matts Leiderstam's "The Meeting" 1999-2000

The work of Matts Leiderstam explores the nature of ‘looking’. He examines our relationship to historical painting and the museum in order to reflect social, political and cultural conditions within our society. In The Meeting 1999-2000 (fig.1), the artist has re-interpreted The Meeting or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet 1854 (fig.2) by Realist painter Gustave Courbet in an attempt to evoke different meanings and interpretations of the work's narrative for today’s audiences. In doing so, he effects a number of mediations from painting to photography, and from studio to site to installation, not only to draw attention to the shift in attitude towards art history, but also to reflect back our attitudes towards gender and sexuality since the wake of AIDS in the 1980s. Throughout this essay I will examine a series of activities and counter-activities at play within Leiderstam’s work. For example, I will discuss his challenge to post-modernism by means of depicting his working processes, thereby exposing a contradiction between the functions of painting and photography. I will also consider the challenge issued to painting by the nature of the sculptural ‘objecthood’ of his work when installed in the museum. Attention will be paid to the way the work also addresses the artist’s reading of a perceived dominant white male heterosexuality within a tradition of art history, shifting the emphasis onto the homosexual feminist discourse, and how this has been hidden in light of society’s and the artist’s interpretation of the past. Furthermore, I will examine how, within The Meeting, Leiderstam has surreptitiously used the motif of the shadow, either by means of interpreting, representing, or reproducing shadows within the artwork. For each manifestation, the shadow's historical and/or symbolic meaning suggests a ‘problem’ to counter our understanding of what we see, how we see it, and what we experience. I aim to explore the ambiguous nature of interpretation, and to examine the artist’s position within the work when presenting these propositions.

This essay is published on Matts Leiderstam's website www.seeandseen.net - click on the link above to read the complete essay.

Special thanks to John Culcutt, Peter Bevan and Matts Leiderstam