Matt Connors: “I’m not satisfied with something unless there’s a problem”

Matt Connors is a painter, a poet, writer and publisher, but it’s probably better to call him a trouble maker and problem solver. “I’m not satisfied with something unless there’s a problem or an itch or unresolved issue,” he tells me. When we meet, in early March, the issue is that his exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA, ‘Finding Aid’, the American artist’s first institutional show in the UK, is just 48 hours from opening and the installation is far from finished. I’m greeted by a pile of unopened crates, but despite everything, he’s calm. It’s all part of his process. “It’s in flux until we finish,” he says. “It’s a very loose and open ended idea.”

Connors was originally asked to do a survey, but he “baulked” at the idea. He tells me he’s instinctual and he doesn’t like over-theorising things. His own paintings, which draw on modernist abstraction, are intended to respond to environments – they’re playful. “I’m a little bit allergic to the art world being so about knowing and didacticism and telling and teaching, and I just wanted it to be more porous and like a snapshot of my thoughts.” Right now, his thoughts are on how he can construct an image of himself through the work of others. So, he’s taken on the role of a curator, placing his work alongside that of 21 other artists – friends, collaborators, and those he simply admires.

Taking a step back and working as a curator suits his way of thinking. “I would always include other people’s work in my own shows, if I could – I’m not usually allowed to – because I don’t make or think about my work in isolation.” Being able to dig into his archive and see his work alongside others’ has led him to question himself. “It’s exciting for me to reunite with older work and ask myself: ‘what am I doing now? How have I grown? How have I not grown?’ That’s not something you really get to do,” he says. “I’m excited to do a show at an art school that’s about learning and not knowing, and finding and non-definition. I think it’s important for students, because they’re often told that they have to have it all figured out.”

He tells me he’s tired of the white cube experience, he wants to “poke holes” in things and “disrupt” them. He points to an eleven-foot Bob Law painting; a bare canvas except for a squeeze of black paint bounding its edges. It’s what he calls a “fuck you” piece. He hopes these pieces will knock viewers out of received wisdom and offer “permission to allow yourself to think. That’s a beautiful thing. It’s something that I think has to be learned, or has to be relearned.”

We walk to the room across the stairwell, where two of Connors’ own wall-sized abstract works are hung face to face. He points out all the techniques he’s used to disrupt the “internal structure” of the works: the split canvases, the huge scale, the wonky lines and the black splodges at their centres. They look like funhouse mirror versions of Law’s painting, which I can see back in the other room through the open door. “I was excited by the disjointed nature of the whole space,” Connors says, “the idea that you would see something and then on another floor you would see an echo of it, and you’d have to remember it, and maybe perhaps remember it wrongly and question your memory.”

He likes how his enormous paintings fall into your peripheral vision and “disappear” when you stand and look at the Miyoko Ito painting hung at one end of the room. He’s just published a book on Ito, and really admires this work. It’s the first time this canvas has been publicly shown in the UK. Ito’s abstract painting is much smaller than Connors’, its colours are muted, it’s delicate, but I can see resemblance to Connors’ work. “I was thinking earlier, if someone came in here and compared the two paintings… this is an oil painting, real oil painting with finesse and mine are very much not that. One could consider it would make mine look bad, but I don’t know, there’s different modalities.”

Connors describes his intention of “constructing an experience” within the works and between the works. He isn’t limiting himself to painting. He’s brought together sculpture (Suzanne Jackson), ceramics (Masaomi Yasunaga, “his processes are ineffable”), drawings and prints (Siobhan Liddell, Guy de Cointet, Patrick Prockter), and photography (Mark Armijo McKnight, Masahisa Fuksase, Robert Cummings and Luigi Ghirri), which plays a key role in the show. “I think about photography all the time. If I had to tell you why, I probably wouldn’t be able to give you a very good answer. It’s kind of what I wanted to investigate in this show.”

We head downstairs, where he picks out a print by Guy de Cointet. “Cointet’s drawings are really important to me. He’s a really mysterious artist that deals with code and found language and the decorative and dramatic, and he’s an artist that I’ll probably be figuring out for the rest of my life.” He calls Cointet a “true artist,” and I ask what he means by that. “I just feel like this is a person that could never have done anything else in his life. And could not have survived today… the work is just super committed. It seems like his life and his artwork were pretty tightly bonded.”

Opposite this is a sculpture by Connors’ friend Matt Paweski. This “purposeless machine object”, as Connors describes it, features a small window revealing a shard of a Clarice Cliff ceramic and a mirror. Connors had bought a bag of broken Cliff ceramics at auction and set Paweski the task of responding to it. “I love this thing. It’s such a strange, confusing thing,” Connors says. “We didn’t talk too much other than the remit of responding to the ceramic. The mirror being in it was a surprise.”

I ask Connors what kind of experience his disruptive, deeply personal curating will have on viewers. “I’m hoping that it’s totally confusing, and that it causes people to ask what’s behind it all, and to interrogate why or what lies behind any kind of aesthetic decision… It’s kind of the question of the show; what does this all add up to? Does it need to add up to anything?” He compares his curation to a rebus – a puzzle where words and images combine to make ideas (?️❤️U) – and to poetry. “I personally think poetry is the meta model for everything,” He says. “Putting two things together and creating a third thing. The magical indescribable, invisible force field that happens when two things are put next to each other.”

Indescribable is the key word. For Connors, art is something to be experienced and troubled by. “I don’t want it to have language attached to it,” he says. “I want there to be a visual, guttural, real experience. It’s boring to me if something can be reduced to the language around it.”