Matt Rebholz is an artist, educator, and graphic novelist from Austin, TX where he is a founding member of the ICOSA Artists Collective and a Lecturer at St. Edward’s University. He received a BFA with a concentration in Drawing and Printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA with a concentration in Printmaking from the University of Texas, Austin. He has attended artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) and the Frans Masereel Centrum (Kasterlee, Belgium). His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, recently showing work at Cloud Tree (Austin), Clamp Light (San Antonio), and Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles).
The spaces depicted in Matt Rebholz’s landscape paintings are informed by film stills from movies that he enjoys intimate and deeply personal relationships with. Through the process of curating and translating these film stills, his work serves as a meditation on the language of cinema, a deconstruction of the history of landscape painting, and an investigation into internal and emotional dreamscapes. Drawn primarily from Westerns and other genre films, these environments have been denuded of all evidence of life, leaving rocky and alien landscapes rendered in an electrified, psychedelic palette.
Many of his works preserve the original aspect ratio of the films from which they are borrowed. This ratio of 2.39:1 (also known as anamorphic widescreen) evokes a cinematic space that invites the viewer to enter and explore the disorienting terrain within the images. Through the appropriation and recontextualization of the cinematographer’s composition, a single fleeting frame of film is drawn out and reconstructed into a persistent moment of introspection.
Rebholz engages with film as a coping strategy to manage his experiences with bipolar disorder. The movies referenced in the paintings represent a comfortable space of retreat and an emotional scaffold in times of crisis. Like bipolar disorder itself, the landscapes that have been built around these films are simultaneously lonesome and populous, quiet and loud, barren and fertile.