Matthew Picton: Urban Organisms
Matthew Picton is a London artist, born in 1960. He studied Politics and History at the London School of Economics and he started his career as an artist in 1998. As the artist himself states, the decision to pursue an artistic path stems from the fact that he needed to express himself in new and different ways. He is currently living in Oregon, USA.
Maps
He bases his work on cartographic maps, which have always fascinated him, and over them he creates an intense sculptural stratigraphy that transforms them from being two-dimensional images to concrete and tangible structures.
“The organism of the city is that of a distinct entity that has been shaped by social, political, economic and topographic factors”
Matthew Picton
The artist shapes his pieces of art on the basis of endless literary, historical and cultural inspirations. He aims to create maps that are not limited to spatial representations of the cities they portray, but as living entities, they are mirror of a social, political, cultural and economic atmosphere.
The artist very often represents a given city several times, but as a living being changes from year to year also the cities of Picton are constantly changing. He wants to represent a precise moment defined in the space and time, which will not be like the next one
London
One of his first works representing London sees three different centuries overlapping. There is the London of the great fire of 1666, in which the poor neighborhoods, consisting of slums piled together, took fire destroying part of the city. Over this city overlap that of 1832, crucial year for Greek independence. Finally modern London in which the artist can live and experience.
London is again represented by the artist in 2010. At the base of this sculpture there are several inspirations. The map of deaths due to the cholera epidemic in the Soho area, which was made by John Snow in 1854, is used as a reference. On the other hand the cover of “The Plaugues Years” by Daniel Defoe is used to create the work itself.
With London 1940 the artist wants to highlight the immense destruction that the city had suffered because of the Second World War. The artwork is divided into four panels and the architectures of the city are created by pages of four different books. The first is “The Very Thought of You” by Rosie Allison, which talks about the precariety of human relations due to war and the other novels are by Christopher Fowler, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen and all describe the criminal world in bellic London.
Venice
Another city that is often represented by the Picton is Venice, maybe because of the great fascination that the artist has for Thomas Mann’s novel “Death in Venice” and for the operatic interpretation of the novel by Benjamin Britten. Mann makes the Venetian adventure of the protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, an extraordinary poetic, psychological and historical metaphor. This aspect is what the artist tries to comunicate through his sculptures.
The Venice of 1911 is the background of Mann’s text and is the one that Picton attempts to represent in 2012. The city is ambiguous, sick, but masked, within it it’s spreading an epidemic of cholera that is hidden not to ruin the high season tourism. Picton’s sculpture is made with the pages of Mann’s text and the addition of the score of Benjamin Britten. The paper buildings are soaked in water and mud taken from the lagoon, as a symbol of the disease that is spreading.
The most recent Venice that the artist has made is inspired by the figure of Casanova. He was born in 1775 in the Venice of the great carnivals and masked balls, which conceal the political decline of the “serenissima“. In the same way Casanova embodies the splendour, the opulence and the inevitable fall of the maritime republic. The sculpture is made from pieces of two posters created for the film “Casanova” by Fellini and from an antique map from the 19th century.
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Featured image: Berlin, Alexander Platz web by Matthew Picton
