• Matthew Cheyne paintings - Mitchell Fine Art
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Matthew Cheyne

The Fountain

The Fountain

$26,000.00 AUD
$26,000.00 AUD
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Year: 2023

Size: 200 x 260cm
oil on linen  

'It might at first glance seem like an odd subject for an Australian painter but the very foreign-ness of the scene is actually what I’m interested in.

As someone of mixed European descent I have been detached from my cultural birthright, the landscapes, landmarks and heritage of my forebears but I have also been liberated from their “baggage”. I don’t have to feel any responsibility to maintain or preserve or accommodate the past. It’s a peculiar freedom I don’t think we recognise.

I can see and understand the historical and political layers of the fountain, but it is also just a crazy pile of naked people drinking and wrestling fish and serpents. There is an absurdity that undercuts the pomposity, a joyfulness that undercuts the sobriety. This balancing of positions is what I am always interested in.

On a separate level I love how these baroque fountains - which are absolutely bonkers, violent, sexual, spurting water, often gilded to boot - have come to feel tame and conservative, something you’d send a postcard of to your grandmother. I always wanted to paint one to try and find that balance too, a point somewhere between the evidence of our eyes and the reflexive sober reading of antiquity'.

Matthew Cheyne
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