Matthew Butera is part artist, part mad scientist. A quick peek through his work will reveal relentless experimentation with any number of artistic tools: paints, pastels, charcoal, pencils, even wood. Matthew is also a photographer, wielding his camera as though it were a magnifying glass, enlarging the world around him until all its beauty and blemishes are brought to light.
Regardless of the medium, Matthew combines it with his dystopic imagination to produce works plucked straight from the dream-state laboratory of his mind. This often makes it hard to prescribe a single genre for Matthew's work, because it is constantly evolving and taking on the influences of music, film and other artists.One quality that persists, however, is its inherit darkness. Fermented in hallucinogenic colours, Matthew captures the strange, the odd and the mysterious.
Matthew's art clashes in the same way one's dreams can never make sense to another person. In a process toward understanding his own dreaming, and emotional compulsions, Matthew's art is an attempt to decode what he cannot make sense of.What the viewer is left with is a textured, brooding and delirious collection of art from the opened compartment of Matthew's soul, and the strewn breadcrumbs of an artist's insanity.
Like most artists, Matthew resents the idea of manufacturing his art as though it were a pop culture commodity; making pretty pictures that are vacant and empty. None of his work is designed for an audience's pleasure alone. His focus on the darker themes of our reality is an obsession that he explores for himself. Art is merely the steering wheel of a much more profound journey, one that keeps his work raw and progressive.Matthew's experiences as an artist, and as a human, are filtered, structured and layered on top of his canvas. Inevitably, some may call his work too strange, or too abstract. No matter the words they choose, each piece of art they see has invisible roots that are steeped in, and been nourished by, the artist's blood, sweat and salty tears.
If Matthew feels his work is too radical, he will lock it away and keep it a secret like some Frankenstein creation, unfit for public consumption. If an artist constantly pours themselves into their art, eventually they will begin to see a reflection, however frightening, maddening or eccentric it is.For Matthew, these projects are the most enriching. They are generally more concerned with ideology or conceptual subjects, but always injected with Matthew's playful use of extremities, contradictions and the really, really peculiar. Why, you may ask, would he keep some of his best work to himself?
Well, Matthew's art, like himself, are just that little bit mysterious. If you dig too deep, no one is quite sure what you may find...
Born in Melbourne Victoria 1993
Exhibitions
Group exhibition Substation Gallery, Newport 2011
Group exhibition "Bimbi Park" VU Level 17 gallery 2012
Group exhibition "First Impressions"VU Level 17 gallery 2012
Group exhibition"2012 Art prize" VU Level 17 gallery 2012
Community Exhibition "Annual Lumen Christi Art Show" 2012
Education
2011 Year 12 Emmanuel College Graduate
2012 Diploma of Visual Arts , Victoria University Flinders street (continuing)
