BORN CREATOR. From my point of view one of the most outstanding and complete artists that humanity has lately brought forward. Conceptual, cognitive fine artist, tireless worker, visual, restless, intuitive, idealist… Matt Lamb has synthesized the fine art culture and evolution of the 20 th century to open a path from reflection and research towards the future. Contemporary art is based on the freedom of plastic means, one of its basic pillars, and despite the decline predictions, the idea of non-directed art and poetry keeps making its way linked to the most profound and disturbing subjects of our existence, precisely because of this freedom opportunity. A conception of the artist as impulse of life, as that “strength of Nature itself which pursues its work in the human spirit”, by G. Séailles, or as the Nature naturante by Paul Klee.
Thus Matt Lamb is presented before us as a paradigmatic creator. His figure and work may be considered from different angles through the rich biographical profile he has in the U.S.A. , Ireland , Germany , Luxembourg , Argentina , France , Spain , China , Switzerland , and recently Russia , as points of reference. Many essays written by famous curators and critics all over the world have investigated Lamb’s parallelisms with the great names of art, such as Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rouault, Clemente, Paul Klee, Appel, Joan Miró, or Joan Abelló himself. There also are countless public and private collections which preserve and spread his works.
His career as a self-taught artist gives him full conceptual freedom in both creative and intellectual aspects. In this spirit, Matt Lamb immerses and recreates himself in an impulsive chromaticism, with a personal and intense colour saturation. His work is hazardous, imaginative, with a clear tendency towards a matteric emphasis of the canvas support. Therein he carries out a visual treatment with a great symbolic load, in which many and singular characters appear taking the matteric texture as a reference point. Faces, human figures and fantastic animals appear with a superb emotional sense and they simplify and synthesize on an irreversible way towards abstraction, in which we discover a refinement line of the more formal schemes. In some of his works, the outlined drawings are the significant elements of a texture and colour conjunction. In other cases, pure matter is the unique protagonist of the composition.
With such characteristic elements Matt Lamb offers us his creative legacy from his plastic art, in a hard and lonely struggle which consequently gives him an exceptional work, with a sincere spirit, free of any superficial pollution and external noises, but sensitive to all cultural emotions which make him go beyond geographic as well as time frontiers. The conjunction of all these factors gives his work an unmistakable personality, which little by little turns Matt Lamb into an unquestionable reference of our nowadays international cultural scene.
Antoni Tàpies, “El arte contra la estética”. Ariel Publishing house. Barcelona, 1978. Pages 155 – 156. |
