Matt Connors on beauty in confusion: “I know what I don’t like”

Beyond the usual suspects of paint tubes, brushes, sketches and stencils, there’s also a piano inside Matt Connors’ studio in Alphabet City, New York. It’s a hand-me-down from a gallery, and reminds the painter of his perpetual desire to one day learn how to play. “In this city, people are always trying to get rid of something, if you just know where to look,” he says.

“I am obsessed with the extreme limitations of something like a piano,” he muses, “but humanity has kept re-inventing it, so the instrument survives.”

Predominantly non-figurative, the 53-year old’s paintings in the last 20 or so years rub shoulders with everyday objects that sparked their conception, but the familiarity remains slippery, strung out and abstracted and beautifully baffling. Sometimes the origin subjects are music or architectural forms, sometimes sentimental objects – in one case, it was a book on 1970s oven designs. Sometimes inspiration comes in the form of daydream.

Working in record shops in his teens gave the Chicago-born artist a taste for album covers. “The way a piece of music is represented with a singular image is close to poetry,” he explains. Throbbing Gristle covers, for example, with their “soft and folk” concealing the “scary music” inside. This gratifying Trojan horse-type discord between representation and content leaks into his paintings. Connors’ new exhibition, ‘Cooperative Village’, inaugurated Herald St’s new Bologna outpost earlier this month with paintings from 2025 and 2026. The painter calls his operation “bottling the initial experience of seeing something and being puzzled.”

Connors borrowed the show’s title from the name of his apartment building which is a part of a gated co-op of artists on New York’s Lower East Side. The conglomerate of buildings is also home to many of his other artist friends. Like a word losing its meaning to an echo of repetition, the title resonates as an “abstract sound ringing in my head,” he says. This unknowing doesn’t intimidate him – instead, he flourishes in “getting lost” a little bit while “leapfrogging from object to idea to painting. I know what I don’t like,” he declares, calling the instinct his “super power”. Confused, satisfied, and fascinated are feelings he seeks in himself and his work.

The painting Impressed Wet Heater (2025) has two crowds of motifs separated by a thick column of dark blue; on each side are loose, decorative swirls and blotches of pinks, yellows, greens, and ambers. Footed Nest (2025) has a similar jumble of thick colouration, here framed by a thick plant green that resembles a window frame.

“Hunting and collecting” source imagery from all corners of life both grounds and variegates Connors’ practice. It could be a snap from his daily 15-minute walk between his apartment and his studio or a brief weekend jaunt to Paris. “An impromptu weekend getaway may at first feel ‘frivolous’, but when I am back at my studio, I am so dependent on all the information I gathered during those times” he says. It is not rare that the analogue “photo dump” he piles on his desk finds its way into a painting, such as in the show’s paintings Jumping Horse(s) (2025) and Jumping Horses II (2026), which originated from a pair of postcards, though you wouldn’t know it. “Once I am in the middle of a painting, the ideal situation is that I forget the [initial inspiration] and launch myself into part two which is when the work becomes itself,” he says.

The correlation between the primary source and the outcome has been more apparent in recent years which have seen Connors letting his sources “survive a little bit more.” Though admittedly “allergic” to his older work in general, he had a recent encounter with a 20-year-old figurative painting that touched a nerve. “I wish I [still] painted like this,” he says. These days, he identifies as a “secretly figurative painter” but his overall quest remains unchanged for the most part: “I am always seeking the specific even if it seems totally unidentifiable.”

Ring Rung and A Circular Play (2025) recall Connors’ pre-grad school years when he used to draw until paint and canvas “ate” the medium. “I like the itchy rubbing of the very exact and inexact,” he suggests.

Often, it circles back to music. But until Connors eventually masters his piano keys, the instrument represents the studio’s other function as the HQ of Pre-Echo, a book and record publisher he started a decade ago. Among his most recent releases is Blue Abstraction, which is a collection of late pianist Jessica Williams’ lost recordings from the 1980s. His 2019-dated painting of various azure hues in stripes, titled Blue Paper Gate, was an obvious choice for the title’s sleeve – he admittedly almost never uses blue in painting which made this rare gem an obvious fit. “I’ve been listening to a lot of piano while painting lately,” he says. Indeed, it’s not difficult to decipher some sense of sonic vibration and on his canvases – at its heart, it’s all harmony, between the felt and the seen.