Matt Rebholz is a painter, illustrator, graphic novelist, and educator from Austin, TX where he is a Lecturer at St. Edwards University and a member of the ICOSA artist’s collective.
The statement below was written to accompany his most recent body of work, a series of landscape paintings based on film stills.
The spaces depicted in Matt Rebholz’s landscape paintings are informed by film stills from Western, Fantasy, and Science Fiction films. These environments have been denuded of all evidence of life, leaving rocky and alien landscapes rendered in an electrified, saturated palette.
Rebholz engages with film as a coping strategy to manage a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder. Genre movies like those 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.