1999 Stanley Picker Fellows Show
Knights Park Gallery, Kingston Upon Thames, Surrey, Uk
October 7th - October 23rd 1999

Matt White's Revolution. Central to White's work is the integrity of the body. It is more than subject matter, for his project focuses on our corporeality. He is fascinated with what it is to be alive and how we situate ourselves in the narrative of our humanity. Accomplished in the new technologies, using the body as the medium of communication, White creates original effects. What is compelling about White's work is that he integrates systems to suspend time, to reveal and to open up an environment for contemplation, that realm of the soma in which we are all firmly implicated. When we glance down to view Pacemaker and study the small horizontal display screen, we see a live human heart beating before us. It is difficult to walk by. White, as surgeon, has opened the body to us. He manipulates the beat, digitally controlling the projection so that the heart gradually slows, revealing the paradox of its vital energy and its inevitable temporality. The heartbeat becomes laboured, and the muffled, distorted, sound effects of its faltering simulate fading breath. Here, death, as with the pacemaker, is within technology's grasp. White has exposed our dependency and although the fiction is revealed in that moment of illusion, the impact of the references remain chilling - we have seen our lifeline in operation.

This fusion of illusion and reality is a fascinating aspect of White's work. The juxtaposition of the 'as if' and the 'actual' forges a moment of life that did not exist. Revolution (a work constructed from the projection of White's naked body) exemplifies this combination. On the wall his full form, ghostly, suspended, draws us into the spell of its mysterious rotation. We watch the pathos of his turning limbs, torso and head, slowly moving in tortured symmetry and wonder - how was it done? But do we need to know, since the piece is so complete and so resolved? This is not a riddle, there is no trickery: White has simply used the most inventive means by which to secure this subtle effect; an effect that is as much painterly illusion as projected image. The figure held in the shaded darkness of the space that surrounds it has been constructed both from actual movement and the digital tints and shadings that cause the body to lose its life. The effect is sombre, recalling the gravitas of that pallid torso which has preoccupied so much Renaissance devotional representation. But the inspiration of entombment in this case is not Christ, rather it is that of our preserved ancestors, the 'bog people', culled from the darkness of unfathomable years. White honours these forebears and by virtue of his contemporary craft has placed his body with theirs, neither lying, nor crucified, simply suspended-in~waifing. A metaphor of death's timeless significance.

Tessa Adams.