Moving Matisse’s Furniture
Living in his house, Le Rêve (the Dream), in the south of
France, Henri Matisse continued to work through the
Second World War in a country ruled by its Vichy
government and subject to the German occupation. Little
of this political and social upheaval showed in his
paintings. I had already been working on some paintings
of expanded domestic interiors and Matisse’s famous
comment about painting, which included his
“comfortable armchair” analogy, kept coming to my mind.
Around 2004 I began to consider making paintings that
placed some of Matisse’s personal domestic furniture into
more agitated contexts, disturbing the dream.
These paintings sit centrally in a larger body of works in
which the domestic interior spaces are rendered
transparent and open to the outside, to strangely lit
cityscapes or more chaotic and uneasy vistas.
D.R. |