Force Majeure

2023

︎Metivier Talks: Matthew Schofield and Melissa Bennett in Conversation︎︎︎

Matthew Schofield is fascinated with everyday photographs; the images themselves, as well the motivations and psyche of the photographers that create them. He combines these interests with a remarkable facility for painting detail, colour and light. Earlier in his career, Schofield worked from printed photographs and colour slides, recreating them in a 1:1 scale. Recently, an important shift happened when he began working directly from digital files. It allows him to zoom in on details and stitch photographs together. An aesthetic choice as well as a conceptual one, he includes the curved borders of the composite images as part of the completed paintings.

The paintings in Force Majeure are based on Schofield’s own photographs from different decades, countries and encounters including locations around his neighbourhood near Trinity Bellwood Park in downtown Toronto. He acts as his own curator, selecting photographs that allude to the notion of force majeure, how unforeseeable events and circumstances can elicit change in our surroundings. This new body of work highlights another important theme in his work which is the narrative. Schofield intentionally seeks out compositions that he is challenged by, avoiding expectation or derivation. The subjects he selects, both as photographer and painter, offer unexpected glimpses of our everyday lives and encourage our imaginations to go beyond the fleeting moment that is captured.

I started to look back through my archive of photographs that I had from over the last two decades. It’s interesting when you see them as a thumbnail versus through the viewfinder. The image pops out at you like, “that looks attractive, that's something I want to reinvestigate”. It became an idea that I thought would be worth exploring and investigating. I started to go through old digital photographs, and I was struck by how I’ve changed from the person that took the photograph several years ago. It’s not the same person that's going to do a painting of the photograph. I’m intrigued by this notion of self-exploration over the distance of time.