CAPE TOWN'S MATTHEW HINDLEY AT 34 LONG

Written by Marcie Levis Saturday, 28 May 2011 20:10

Cape Town, SA - 34LONG, one of Cape Town’s new generation of contemporary visual art galleries, holds the work of Matthew Hindley in high esteem.  A measure of their confidence in Matthew’s art is the fact that they are hosting Before My Time, an exhibition of his recent works in their upstairs gallery simultaneously with LIMITED/unlimited, Takashi Murakami’s first solo show in South Africa downstairs.  On exhibition 14 November – 9 December.  Hindley has been working in oils for some time now, having started his career with computer generated art work.  He loves paint, and he loves the history of paint.

Along with Frida Kahlo, Irma Stern, Henri Rousseau, Caravaggio, Kafka, amongst many, he acknowledges Murakami as a formative influence in his work.  He looks forward to exhibiting in close proximity to Murakami fearlessly, saying that he no longer thinks comparatively, no longer searches outside himself for ideas: his journey is internal, into his own idiom, his own history, family, relationships, fears, happiness, tragicomedy… He retraces, rewrites and reinvents his own trajectory, but does not see time and space as constraints; hence the exhibition title.

The paintings for Before My Time fall into a self-imposed, mainly naturalistic pictorial genre, in which portraits and landscapes come to resemble action packed movie stills.  Skeletons do hip hop dances and burn castles, ghost kittens sit around lonely sad girls, people stare out to sea, trees grow out of clouds, everything happens slowly.  Having been a Catholic altar boy in South Africa, Hindley adds, means that religion and race feature also, inevitably.  Though this sounds like pure story-telling fantasy, Hindley denies that the paintings are primarily narrative.  They are emotionally-laden inventions, events, which could not exist in any other genre.