Matthew Reed is a painter and visual artist from along the St. Lawrence River in Upstate New York State.  Reed’s paintings associate techniques used in collage and portraits to create a surreal yet hyperreal evocation of social life, performance, labor, leisure, and romance. His paintings are as much familiar as they are alien; as much commentary as they are observation. When I see Matt’s work, I think of how wrong Salvador Dali was when he said, “the last great surrealists are in American advertising.” Clearly, he hadn’t seen Matthew Reed’s “Hungover on Job Site” or “Loft in 2023”. In fact, Reed does what all great surrealists do: never indulge in abstraction for purely aesthetic or theoretical reasons, but search for moments that present the visceral nature of life fully in their absurdity and uncanniness. There's something about just looking at shadowy figures in bars accompanied by panther-like creatures lurking in the background or a jesus-like figure wearing a Looney Tunes shirt reaching for a beer that help us understand the sublime, the human, the consumerism, the overlooked, the forgotten, the everpresent, and clearly embodies the spirit of what it is like to be alive today. No one does what Matthew Reed is doing. 

-Evan Gray (https://www.evan-gray.com/about)