…The surfaces are really important to me. If you’ve only ever seen paintings digitally, they look super graphic, but in person and up close they can be pretty rough, with lots of layers of paint and boogers and wobbly lines. I actually like that breakdown between the photo and real life. You have to experience them in real time and space to appreciate them as made, touched, imperfect objects. – Matt Kleberg
While the earlier work by Matt Kleberg featured cowboys, birds, and bottles that drew from his childhood in Fort Worth, the most recent paintings shift away from his central subjects to the architectural spaces he included behind them. Kleberg finds inspiration from the buildings he encounters on his walks around his neighborhood in Brooklyn. The layered flecks of color come from his art practice, where he may paint one section and then change the color the next day, allowing the oil stick to skip across the surface and retain some of the background color. As a result, the texture shows the history of the work, as Kleberg describes, “the painting starts to accrue more layers, a sense of time, a record of bad ideas.”