Matthew Hindley @ Spier Contemporary 2010
Matthew Hindley’s I meant to have but modest needs was selected to be included in Spier Contemporary 2010.
The exhibition comprises 132 artworks from 101 artists. Distilled from over 2,700 national submissions, it is a visual and aural barometer of South Africa in 2010. The artists have contemplated and exposed every element of the South African condition: our fears, our joys, our humour and our trepidations. It speaks to the past, and imagines the future. It serves up a plethora of views and challenges us to think differently. It gives us a poetic, private moment with our world.
In this painting, Matthew Hindley explores the subtleties of humane darkness, with studio as testing ground for a potential creative utopia. Rich, velvet darkness is suggestive of loss – of consciousness, light, power, sanity – and unhindered exploration of desires usually contained in the realm of dreams is made possible.
Formally, while the work is a figurative rendition of a moment in time, its surface tilts towards abstraction, throwing a thin veil over realism in favour of interpretive memory. Hindley explores the generosity of the colour black, creating visual planes as darkly exhilarating as the fundamental schizophrenia of confronting issues of identity, sexuality and death.
Through the duration of the exhibition, the painting has received an astounding amount attention in popular media in Cape Town and on the web.
