At your service
Matthÿs Gerber is always ready to oblige his viewers.
To the viewer bred on a modern diet of anorexic abstraction and visual restraint, Gerber's oeuvre might seem hard to digest. Formally extravagant, the works offer up an apparent excess of figurative and psychological detail. Gerber's work is characterised by high key colours, enormous canvases and superreal forms. The later works, in particular, have a superpolish; the surface of the canvas becomes a reptilian skin.
The formal excess in Gerber's earlier work (1983-85) can be found in an obsessive attention to detail. Figures are labelled by letters and numbers, marked with tattoos and occasionally cut up to reveal sinews and bone. The bodies are located in surreal landscapes - floating, running, gazing back and metamorphosing. Yet the works have a more rational intent than this description suggests. Something more didactic than fantasy is indicated in this obsessive cataloguing of flesh; something between an anatomy and a pathology of the human form.
Later works (1986-87) slide from the surreal to the hyperreal. The dissected bodies disappear altogether and the physical cut-ups reappear in the form of a moral slip, in an aberrance of gesture and expression. In these works, female faces stare down from enormous canvases and facial expressions slide between the seductive and the lewd. At any normal viewing distance the faces break up and the features - red lips, teeth, enormous eyes, rubber gloves, latex caps, and jewellery - appear.
In Gerber's most recent works the surfeit of figuration gives way to a surplus of decoration. An excess of metaphor in the early work resurfaces in the form of a series of quotable quotes: "Let It Be Me", "Don't Spare... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Clint Eastwood, 1987. Oil on canvas, 165 x 180cm. Courtesy Mori Gallery, Sydney. Photo: Fenn Hinchcliffe.
For Mary Shelley, 1983. Oil on canvas, 197 x 148cm. Courtesy Mori Gallery, Sydney. Photo: Jill Crossley.
