Pedro Matos

Pedro Matos is a Portuguese artist, born in Santarém in 1989. Between 2008 and 2012, he studied at Central Saint Martins in London, ArCo Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual in Lisbon, and Faculdade Nacional de Belas-Artes in Lisbon, he now lives and works in Portugal.

 

Pedro Matos transforms the banal markings from our daily life and elevates them to the condition of a work of art. Inspired by textures observed on walks by the sea or in the city, Matos’ work presents abstracted and alien landscapes formed of familiar shapes. Drawing upon his experiences, Pedro uses objects of reality to explore new avenues of abstraction. His canvases are created through a process that combines imprinted images, photography, photoshop, and projection.

 

Matos’ subject matter concerns the urban everyday, represented through enlarged images of incisions and carvings found on walls, doors, trees, in stairwells or in public toilets. These are normally fleeting marks, forgotten as soon as they are noticed, yet Matos suspends them in pictorial time and space. Another object of his attention is the typical marble paving slab found in the driveways of suburban homes in Portugal. Here, Matos finds inspiration in the jagged shape and falsely geometric positioning of these objects. They are photographed, enlarged, and painted onto an un-primed canvas in acrylic enamel.

 

By incorporating traces of the urban everyday into his work, Matos tackles the notion of the pictorial art image and simultaneously enlightens the viewer to the semiotic richness of the seemingly banal. The works appear as though they do not resemble anything, but Matos chronicles the surrounding world, taking the seemingly irrelevant minutiae of daily life and brings it to the forefront of his practice.