“I try to paint modern life and capture those perfect moments etched into our memories, but about which we never talk with each other. Each painting uses the gesture of the model, the scene to evoke a form of Platonism, an archetypal concept, a distilled essence; this thing that lasts beyond the moment.”

During his art studies in the United States and Europe, Matt Story very early demonstrated a unique ability to portray things as they were, a gift for hyperrealism. A graduate of U.C.L.A., he has mainly worked in film and television from his Los Angeles Studio. In 2013, he left L.A. with his wife to travel and moved to New Mexico in which he paints 12 hours or more per day, every day of the week.

Lauded for his “photorealistic” technique, the artist nevertheless says that he had never really intended to achieve this effect, similar to an unbiased camera view. For him, “there is so much more to see in a work born of human memory alone.”

Although, as it is based on the same aesthetic principles, it is regarded as a branch of photorealism, hyperrealism distinguishes itself by a more emotional approach to its subject, whereas photorealism, born in the 1960s, inherited from Pop Art a mechanically precise style whose imagination is limited to the pragmatic representation of everyday life.

Matt Story’s hyperrealist paintings are all types of déjà vus, confronting the viewer with the illusion of memory through another illusion; that of a high-definition digital image. His technique of oil painting on canvas, based on thin glazes, the use of greasy textures on thin glazes actually closely matches the classic method used by masters such as Titian and Caravaggio, the two artists that inspire him the most. This is a traditional way of working to create works that positively scream modernity.

Credits : Matt Story – Robert Lange Studios