Matias Cuevas | The Fire in the Mirror

May 7- June 28, 2015

MATIAS CUEVAS

The Fire in the Mirror

May 7 - June 28, 2015

CUEVAS TILLEARD PROJECTS is pleased to present The Fire in the Mirror, a solo exhibition of work by Matías Cuevas.

Born out of an epiphany in a hardware store, Matias Cuevas’s work draws from the traditions of painting, filtered through the everyday. As a painter, Matias finds the studio a sustainable environment for personal expression. There he performs a daily ritual of painting and art-making where fiction and reality collapse in order to transform the ordinary.

Embracing the tradition of painting in a playful manner, Cuevas uses an innovative technique of setting fire to, then staining nylon carpet with paint thinners and acrylics. He came on this method after having an epiphany while shopping at a hardware store. Over time, Matías’s use of carpet, fire, and acrylics, have allowed him to explore a certain mark-making immediacy, and a personal sense of depth and meaning. Whether visceral, whimsical, or ethereal, his work is a celebration of a years-long daily painting performance and a poetic ambition for self- expression.

Within The Fire in the Mirror, Matías explores and bridges a range of pictorial languages while always relying on the simplicity and dynamic nature of his process. Embracing abstraction, chance, and form in a playful manner, the work in the exhibition shows the artist continuing to push the possibilities of his medium. Drawing inspiration from artist’s like El Greco, Kandinsky, Miro, Chagall, Pollock, Yves Klein and the Washington Color School, his alchemically altered textures and idyllic washes of color materialize a luminous presence completely transforming the everyday.

Matías Cuevas was born in Mendoza, Argentina in 1980. Following his early classical training at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Cuevas received his MFA in 2009 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded an International Student Graduate Scholarship, a MFA Fellowship Award, and the SAIC Excellence in Leadership Award. Recent exhibitions of his work have been held at El Museo del Barrio (New York), Lehmann Maupin Gallery (New York), Leyendecker Gallery (Spain), Alderman Exhibitions (Chicago), and The Green Gallery (Milwaukee). His work is part of numerous private and public collections, including the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario and Museo de Arte Moderno de Mendoza. Matías Cuevas currently lives and works in New York City.