Matt Doust

There's A Sameness In Our Difference

ColoursPedia is pleased to present new works from Australian founded creative person Matt Doust. An carried out portraitist, Doust’s hyper-realistic paintings explore the notion of identity through the external betrayals of the body. The artist’s dramatic human country side stap into the subtle revelations of physical sign, drawing the viewer’s attention to the subject’s minutest minutia. At times voyeuristic, these larger than life portraits are both alienating and intimate. Undeniably beautiful, they appear haunted and resonate with a provocative sense of discomfort. Doust sketches on our anxiety and fascination when faced with the other in this unfamiliar proximity and scale, forcing monumental revelations of intimacy upon us.

The paintings express a sense of irreconcilable distances: those between the well known and the alien, the self and the other – and yet do so somehow by uniting this sense of estrangement with a feeling of intimacy. While portraiture is ostensibly a study of the target subject, Doust reveals that it is as much about the artist’s selective revelation, and the viewer’s projections, as it is about the interior inhabits of those revealed. The artist’s haunting portraits remain evasive alloys of the glimpsed and the unknown, and appear to instigate an interminable yearning in the viewer to “possess” the inward motivations of the vague sitters. These portraits reveal certain thing of the yearn for sameness, and this desire’s coexistence with the estrangement of manifest distinction, in our distributed seek for human attachment.

Matt Doust captures the fleeting and intangible impressions of persona, those we read from the body, and immortalizes them in portraiture. The artist’s proficiency to arrest the attractive and the odd simultaneously, and his appreciation of imperfect perfection, outcomes in portraits that are as much about absentia as they are about what is manifest. Upon glimpsing Doust’s paintings, we are strangely cognizant of the failure of our own holistic effects, and of ourincompetence to arrest the “truth” of the other. possibly the work’s subtle melancholy comes from this realization of our own covetous disappointment: the subject is habitually slightly afterour grab. These portraits supply us with a uncommon opening to slowly excavate the intimacies of the body: seeking for some sense of “truth”, communion, or revelation in the body material.Doust captures what stirs under the coverings of his topics. With large mechanical facility, and aauthentically unparalleled refinement and minutia, he is able to animate an inanimate exteriorwith an evasive internal life.

Alongside Stormie Mills

Solo Show

Early Look

Inside Studios

See Reference