Look very closely at this Matt Straub work for a second or two. Now close your eyes and ask yourself this question: Whom did you identify with almost automatically? The shooter or the man being shot?
The iconography of popular culture - a nexus of symbols that any person raised on comics or graphic novels is familiar with - is a deceptively straightforward one. All we need is the context of plot and characters in order to validate the linear logic of correct actions and reactions. Without that context, however, there is only a surmise that a bullet has found the right trajectory of justice. The quick and the dead are almost instinctively translated to the right and the wrong.
The masked man in the picture doesn't seem that eager to voice an opinion. For that matter, would he have to?
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About the Artist
Location: NYC
Born in Cheyenne Wyoming, Matt Straub spent his early years hitchhiking and hopping freight trains across the Western states. Straub reveals his deep nostalgia for the harsh landscapes of the American West in his latest body of work, "I'm Hit. But I Can Make It."
With a bold comic visual vocabulary and sensibility, Straub's paintings echo the period of transition between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Featuring classic Western iconographic images of cowboys, cowgirls, guns, and horses, Straub's paintings and collages depict the humorous and violent narratives and sentimental mythologies of the American West – a landscape defined by melancholy sunsets, badlands, gunfights, outlaws and red-blooded heroes. His references include Hollywood Westerns and the Comics and Pulps of the 1940s-50s.
Straub's graphic and illustrative narratives combine characters and caricatures inspired by Western pulp writers and illustrators such as Zane Grey and Raymond Kinstler and film directors John Ford and Sergio Leone. The paintings' varied surfaces resonate with affinities to artists such as William De Kooning, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Sigmar Polke and Brice Marden.
Straub's work also looks under the hood of the present day reality of the American West, with its concrete plains and Mini-Mart cowboys—places where the buffalo used to roam. Straub tackles the highs and lows of society with a comic visual vocabulary and a bold, fresh Pop Art sensibility. His Pop-Westerns are like graffiti-splattered box cars rolling across the plains, their nostalgia a metaphor for a vanishing West.
Find out more @ http://mstraub.com
