About Jacob Mattes
Jacob Mattes (born 1998 in Esslingen am Neckar) lives and works in Vienna, Salzburg and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. His artistic practice is self-taught and has developed since 2013 through an intensive engagement with painting. He combines design clarity with an intuitive approach to figure, fragment and abstraction.
Mattes completed a communications design diploma at the Werbedesign Academy Salzburg, as well as a business studies degree with a focus on marketing and sales at the FH Wien der WKW.
Jacob Mattes's pictures are in a constant state of flux. They pile up and dissipate into indefinable shapes, struggling in waves of pastel-coloured gestures. They negotiate order and dissolution simultaneously. Kaleidoscopic and fluid, they appear almost baroque in their love of form, yet seem to capture the present moment, the moment of becoming.
Having grown up in an artistic environment as an autodidact, Mattes has developed a personal painterly language. His dialogue with the surface is characterised by a flexible choice of standpoints. Mattes often works on the floor or on horizontal surfaces, allowing him to approach the image from all sides. This approach, of circling the canvas, also shapes what becomes visible on the surface: no single viewpoint dominates, and no predetermined reading direction determines the composition. This approach avoids image hierarchies and ensures that every axis is given equal weight. The painted knots and lumps resemble rippling waves and are always in a state of movement. The shapes are in a state of flux – formations that appear and disappear as if they were reluctant to find a definitive form. The delicate, pastel grounding, applied with water-soluble chalk, forms a breathable base. Over these airy surfaces, calligraphic ink gestures dance, setting accents and drawing contours. Even the lines carry movements that condense and disperse again. Between this precision and its expressive dissolution, image bodies emerge that both step forward and sink into the surface, setting themselves apart from other layers or dissolving into colour. Through this encounter, collision and intertwining of the elements, wind-like, floating compositions are created. Ultimately, Mattes does not paint specific bodies, but rather constellations of movements and rhythmic surfaces. His works are not abstractions in the classical sense, but rather independent painterly entities – contrasting surfaces that form bodies and become choreographies of pastel-coloured waves.
Jacob Mattes, geboren 1998, lebt und arbeitet in Salzburg, Wien und Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
– Niklas Koschel
Growing up in an artistic field of tension between concrete-abstract painting and fragile-anthropomorphic sculpture, Jacob Mattes developed an uncontrollable creative impulse at an early age. Guided by this familial sensibility, the figure becomes the protagonist in his oeuvre, which oscillates perpetually within the realm of painting. She appears in it in varying degrees of clarity and subtlety. In an intimate painting process, he first creates the foundation of his flat, painterly compositions, which is characterised by a soft palette and a lasur-like application of colour. As the genesis progresses, the initial intuition gives way to control: virtuosically, he breaks through the dynamically opening, airy image world with a strong line and contrasting contours, guided by deep emotion and the fundamentals of painting. The work develops its narrative, which stimulates without prescribing. To this end, he severs the figure into its constituent parts. He abstracts until ultimately only rudiments remain. In doing so, Mattes completely divorces himself from the notion of creating a concrete image of the protagonists that form in his mind, their proportionality and thus the foundations of his initial nude drawings – he deliberately creates a sense of estrangement. Physiognomic details emerge. Hands and feet, for example, that seem to come from another world. A world that is worth exploring.
– Patrick Schuster