Simon Oliver: What are you working on currently?

Matthew Johns: A series of paintings which take their lead from video-

taped sports footage. I’ve been video-taping live sports coverage, and using 

the material in forming an initial image, which I begin to paint from.

 

SO: Replicating video stills in oil paint?

 

MJ: Well, recovering the viewing experience in paint. Attempting to locate 

similarities and points of departure in the live visual flow of the television 

image, and in the still painting surface. Paint is physically mediated in the 

phase of making, so it is a moving image of sorts at the point of inception.

 

SO: You actually paint from the moving image then?

 

MJ: No, I use a digital camera in order to pluck-out an image from a passage 

that appeals.

 

SO: And what is it that appeals?

 

MJ:  I was interested in the way live TV is produced, particularly sports coverage 

as it is simultaneously edited and created as the event unfolds. Cameras 

following action and the live manipulation of the spectacle.  There are also 

formal interests, the type of mark produced by the screen, and in turn the 

digital camera, a kind of gestural grid-bound pixel as opposed to the haptic 

brush stroke, but hands are behind the scenes somewhere, conducting 

operations. Anyway, it is using this as a type of digital cartography as a 

springboard from which to proceed ‘freehand’, as they say.

 

SO: Handiwork.

 

MJ: There’s also a particular kind of TV light, made in-studio but transferred to 

the screen. This stage-managed artificial light isn’t too far away from the 

controlled light of painted interiors from art history, Chardin, Vermeer, 

Caravaggio.

 

SO: Isn’t this conflation of art and popular culture, sports in this case, a rather 

tenuous link, conforming to a media driven vogue for fresh combinations of 

cultural matter?

 

MJ: I suppose there are correspondences with what is superficial ephemera; 

Sunday supplement chaff. I think the idea of lifestyle media operates in a 

different continuum altogether. No, for me the work comes from the 

experience of looking. I’d taken to taping football highlights in order to enjoy 

passages of play again, the stuff that warranted closer inspection. This led to 

thinking that certain sport forms share common ground with specific modes 

of art. I mean visually, in a formal sense you have a prepared rectangle, literally 

drawn-out, white painted lines on a cut green surface. This is at the centre of 

an appropriate architecture, designed to showcase a human engagement 

taking place. Add to that the simultaneous and perpetual mediation and 

dissemination of the game, this television production is what I find 

compelling  as a subject for painting. It is also my, or shall I say ‘our’ place in 

the scheme of TV consumption that I wish to acknowledge too.

 

SO: What do you mean?

 

MJ: Consider what, if anything, the term active-viewing could mean… So I 

decided to act, how might I become part of the televisual circuit, Baudrillard 

says something about a ‘ciphering strip’, he seems to imply this as a closed 

entity, I don’t see why that has to be the case. Perhaps it is more than possible 

to interrupt the one-way stream with viewer’s input, not feedback, but input, 

actual and acting. What I see as a live, ongoing image circulation. After I’d 

taped the action I realized I could use the material in other ways than 

watching it, so I made digital photographs from the screen, to check how the 

camera would interpret the moving video image, and I photographed the fast-

forwarding and rewinding image.

 

SO: Why the fast-forwarding and rewinding images?

 

MJ: I see it as a form of sculpting or drawing with the tape. And also playing 

with recovering a memory, what some like to describe as Proustian. Well, 

recovering a memory, yes, indelibly inscribed on a piece of tape, like 

Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning; wiped away, but De Kooning’s mark is in 

there. I thought of painting from the taped and photographed image as 

physically expanding it, knocking it into a different, but relevant shape, the 

nascent tendrils of a memory web. I liked the notion of trying to paint the 

scan bars which lie across the speeding image, like video jet-stream or the 

cartoon velocity lines of Roadrunner.the scan-bars offered a potential in paint 

handling, something like Monet’s conception of a water surface, if you follow 

me?

 

SO:  I suppose, in the sense that Monet captured a way of seeing water 

surfaces, and at the same time was explicit in his acknowledgement of the 

painted brushstroke. What you seem to be doing is attempting to find a place 

for painting among the slew of techno-images we are all confronted 

by these days.

MJ: Most people, more or less, possess a TV/sofa set-up in their homes. A space 

designed with a view to a screen. There may even be a channel featuring 

water gardens too.

SO:  I’d like to return to what you said earlier about the similarities between art 

and sports. You talked of a formal overlap, but were there any other properties 

you had in mind?

MJ: Yes, there’s an order, a structure with rules and systems. There’s technique, 

and applied knowledge, which is offset by a benign chaos coming out of 

human action, in turn, yielding improvisation and the unexpected, the need 

to adapt to a mutable circumstance. This is of course liberally peppered with 

futility, mistakes and frustration, boredom at times. However, the negatives 

serve to heighten the elusive moments of skill, beauty even, in hushed tones 

we could even talk of the sublime. Chance would be a fine thing though. But 

getting back to the painting project, after all the talk of the arena of play, it 

was the TV studio itself that I painted, or rather a room in the stadium used by 

the production unit. It was the idea of former professionals proffering opinion, 

the critical category of punditry as it has become known. This to me is a 

transferable allegory of many things.

SO: I see what you’re saying. Men in suits negotiating, offering or imposing 

their expert analyses, sounds familiar. Gravitas swaddled in Armani.

mj: Exactly. Boardroom, sales seminar, The Hague. The body language of these 

former athletes learning a completely new body language, at first they seem 

so cardboard, mirroring each others physical positioning in mutual cliché. But 

you soon start to see them adapt and find a way of being, at least 

seeming natural, a way of letting a little bit of themselves seep into the cipher 

strip, which I suppose is the key isn’t it?

SO: That’s it, the method, the line… “Just act natural”, “Action!”

London, 2009.

                  

*Simon Oliver is a writer and designer living and working in London