Matthew Couper "In Memory of Water"

Matthew Couper "Mothers Milk Aquifer" 2016 oil on canvas 62x144in

Works by Las Vegas based artist Matthew Couper touch on desert issues with "In Memory of Water" at Room, a not-for-profit art space in New York.  The paintings and oil-sketches "draws our attention to symbols of contemporary cultural malaise - the bombardment of information overload, and the urgent need for decisions pertinent to our survival to be made while time is running out," says the website. The robust essay by Warwick McLeod reads in part:

Jevijoe and Giorgio view "Mother's Milk Aquifer" by Matthew Couper at Room Artspace NYC #matthewcouper #inmemoryofwater #roomartspacenyc

A photo posted by JK Russ (@jorussphoto) on Dec 11, 2016 at 7:25am PST

In setting up the dynamic of the artwork, Matthew Couper's basic technique is simple enough. A genre is selected from art history that is paradoxical to the issue under examination, overlaying them so as to have one provide the backdrop or the costumes for the other. This automatically winds up the clockwork of the painting, for the many mechanisms of irony therein to be variously set into moton, as the eye travels around the picture. In a set of oil-on-paper studies, diagrams tracing vectors of affiliation between multinational corporations are overlaid on paintings replicating images, famous from art history, of the abundance and life-giving bounty of water. Painting them in the colors of Delftware already renders that a subject of nostalgia: so that the tracings on top read like the obsessive greed-plotting of a mind squeezed, in starvation and thirst, to its thinnest, meanest single-mindedness.

Such an accuracy of selection of imagery requires both a precise critical analysis of contemporary politics and culture and an encyclopedic knowledge of art history. A wriggling wrestling-match of irony between tag-teams from art history goes on in every corner of these highly-populated paintings. Here, and in their rational criticality, the paintings are reminiscent of William Hogarth; and in fact they are kindred in spirit with him and with Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray, the English satirists of the 18th century.

Matthew Couper "Nestle 2" Eastlake 2016 oil on paper 9x12in