The language employed in Matt Connors paintings is (among other things): color, soft geometry and inspired, yet muted paint handling. Connors intuitively builds his paintings out of rectangles, ellipses and planes of solid color that seemingly, and improbably, never repeat from painting to painting. There are internal and organic rules in each of Connors paintings, and while carefully executed, they never feel micro-managed or plotted out. In each canvas there is a found and individual logic within, each an individual within the crowd.

In his installation at CANADA, Connors expands the traditional formula of exhibiting painting by building shelves and painting swatches of color on the wall for the paintings to exist on. In this way, Connors literalizes the abstract nature of his paintings, reversing the more common mode of abstracting the literal. It is as if the paintings break the bounds of the rectangles and become active in our environment. It is this back and forth that invigorates these paintings and charges them with the spark of live investigation.

There is also pop humor in Connors work. One can’t help feeling the hermetic chill of high modernism melting with the cautiously boffo ideas that Connors packs into his paintings. The drawing and forms often have the rigor of an Ellsworth Kelly painting, but it is cut with color that is like the sugary dust at the bottom of an empty Fruit Loops box.

The ideas in Connors paintings span personal symbolic space to broader social impulses. The paintings can remind us of listening to records alone in our bedrooms or “bigger “ movement type things like the U.N. The tension between these spaces, inward and external, makes these paintings intriguing and mysterious. The viewer is held in a state of suspense and curiosity: what is the next move? We may find ourselves looking at an enlarged schematic of a micro chip, the weave of a course linen, a map of Argentina, or perhaps, if we are lucky, at Canada.

Matt Connors has recently exhibited work in group and solo shows at The Breeder in Athens, LuttgenMeijer in Berlin and China Art Objects in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2006 and is currently living and working in Los Angeles.