McClune, Matt – Galerie Renate Bender

Matt McClune was born in 1973 in Worcester, MA, USA. He lives and works in St. Romain, France.

For the past 15 years Matt McClune has been taking visual clues from the environments of particular locations he was visiting in Europe and abroad and distilling them into his often quiet, meditative paintings, flooded with light. At times bordering on the monochrome, more often active and gestural, the many-layered washes of clear polyurethane gel, containing pure, finely-dispersed pigments, are applied to various metallic supports with specially-made spatulas of varying widths. Ideally seen in changing natural light, McClune’s paintings often shift in mood and color, as the light of day penetrates into the layers.

McClune’s early paintings were abstract aerial landscapes, as seen from an airplane window, with vague but profound depth and space. Moving to the French countryside of Burgundy in 2004, surrounded by people interested in the idea of “terroir” brought about paintings that were both “of a specific place, at a specific time” as well as paradoxically non-representational. This, combined with his compositional structures, creates work that is both intellectually rigorous and immaterially transcendental.