Matt Connors: Thirty-Four Reverse Telescopes and Three Buttons

Thirty-Four Reverse Telescopes and Three Buttons catalogs the artist’s recent body of colored Plexiglas works, made between 2013 and 2016, introduced obliquely with a poem by Ben Estes. Painter Matt Connors (born 1973) is known for combining a modernist visual vocabulary of grids and tense, minimal compositions with influences from design, poetry and music. Connors’ recent series of works brings this sensibility into the play of media: paintings in acrylic on paper are mounted on colored matte board, framed behind colored Plexiglass, creating an effect of nested colored forms in space. Both objects and paintings, the deeply hued, mixed-media pieces have been reproduced in Thirty-Four Reverse Telescopes and Three Buttons in black and white as well as color, highlighting the works’ complex tonality in addition to their dynamic coloration.