A closer look: Matthew Stickland – All Down On The Ground

In All Down On The Ground, a group exhibition curated by Grazia Mori, Matthew Stickland’s paintings hold a distinct sense of stillness.

They seem to hover between the material and the dream-like, their surfaces alive with a quiet tension.

I hope that I can make a world that people can find themselves in.

Thereby Stickland invites the viewer into a space that is at once constructed and porous — paintings that offer not so much narratives as spaces to inhabit.

A key motif in Stickland’s practice emerges in Swimmer, where two reduced figures occupy the foreground. Their forms are simple, even schematic, yet that very reduction operates as a mode of address or a space of entry. Like inverse silhouettes, they offer themselves as thresholds the viewer can cross, so that the painting is completed only in the act of looking.

You can make out things about the figures, but they are very reduced. That is great for allowing the rest of the painting to be activated.

He likens this process of recognition to seeing the familiar sign on a bathroom door: an immediate cue that you complete for yourself. That invitation to project on to the painting in a participatory notion gives his work its charge, requiring the viewer’s presence to come alive.

The urban environments Stickland paints are not depictions so much as distillations — composites of memory and imagination. They reference real places but always through a certain reduction, relying on the residue of experience. This technique is effective in evoking a dreamlike atmosphere because it mirrors the logic of dreaming itself: a process of world-building that draws equally from recollection and invention. In this sense, Stickland’s practice recalls Descartes’ painter analogy — the idea that even the imagination borrows its colours from life. His work subtly proposes that perception is never purely observational, but always reconstructed from what lingers in memory.

Growing up in an urban environment has, he notes, shaped his sensibility as a painter. What intrigues him are “spaces that seem quiet, but not quiet as in country fields,” he says.

It is more interesting to use large blocky concrete buildings and create a world where there is a quietness around them.

Through colour and form, he transforms the impersonal textures of the city into ones of contemplation. This visualisation is effectively subversive: the city, synonymous with motion, noise and excess, becomes a site of suspension, of quietness. A juxtaposition that carries particular resonance for a London audience, offering a momentary, unexpected stillness not beyond the urban, but within it.

Surface becomes the site where these tensions materialise. Stickland’s paintings are tactile; they assert their material presence even though they operate in half-remembered settings.

Giving my paintings a certain type of physicality is important to me. My sources can be quite non-material so the paintings can take the form of things that present themselves as sort of dream-like spaces or memories or something that is not quite in the physical world. For me, creating a textured surface solidifies that space and makes it real.

The tension between the imagined and the tangible runs throughout his practice. In this sense, his work can be read as an ongoing act of realising, resisting and transgressing the boundaries between perception and materiality.

Stickland’s choice of wood as a support deepens this dialogue between image and object. Stickland speaks about wood with an affection that feels almost biographical.

Woodworking was a subject in my secondary school and it was one of the few subjects that I would always really look forward to. When you are working in your studio over time and through experimentation things work their way into your practice. If there is something in your life you really enjoy doing, it should make its way in, in some form.

The craft element remains integral to his process. Even before any paint touches the surface, Stickland begins shaping what he wants from the work, cutting a piece of MDF, attaching plywood strips to make it hover slightly from the wall, conveying an object quality. He also mentions a liking for the weighty quality of wood.

This attention to weight, both literal and metaphorical, anchors Stickland’s work within All Down on the Ground, asking how the imagined might take form and how memory might be built into matter.