Dissuasive fire is term used by the military essentially meaning fire first and ask questions later. For this project, I used fluorescent orange paint and two panels to elicit a quick blast of gun fire.

In September 2007, I was invited for a month-long residency at St. Mary's College of Maryland, located next to historic St. Mary's City, the site of the first settlement in the colony of Maryland. It is also near a former Union Army prison where literaly thousands of Confederate soldiers died in captivity during the Civil War. This area of Maryland is rife with personal histories.

The college generously provided me with a furnished house and a private studio on a large plot of land next to the first road built in the colony (it looked like Sleepy Hollow). What the college failed to me tell me, however, which I quickly learned, was that the house was haunted. Now I'm not a superstitious person, but after countless uncanny experiences at the house — dishes rattling in the dish rack in front of me, shadows moving across walls, the television turning on and off unexplicably, etc. — I reached the following conclusion. The most rational explanation was that the house was haunted.

In response, I focused the duration of my residency on making paintings for ghosts. Abstract paintings for an abstract audience. I used vaporized paint (spray paint) in fluorescent and metallic colors on paper. The works were one-offs, immediate, and unedited.

Monochrome (Asymmetric Warfare) was my largest site-specific spray paint monochrome to-date.  The piece, which was installed off-center on a large wall at the gallery, was incited by the Asymmetric Warfare Group, a new unit of the United States military created during the Global War on Terrorism.  Asymmetric warfare refers to war between two groups whose relative military power differs significantly, including differences in goals, strategies, tactics, and available resources.  My work, which was in essence a scorch mark on the wall resembling a bomb-drop, complemented artist Richard Bell's target painting on the adjacent wall.

In September 2007, I was lucky enough to be invited for a month-long residency at St. Mary's College in Maryland, where the college spoiled me rotten with a furnished house and a private studio.   The most valuable part of the residency to me though was time and the space to think.  My studio was set back on the property behind the house, and every day as I walked to and from the studio, I noticed the oddest assortment of rusty metal poles of various sizes and purposes sticking out of the ground all over the property.  For some unknown reason, maybe it was the spray paint fumes in the studio, I had the oddest urge one day to paint them. 

The college was located near the Patuxent Naval Air Test Center and I visited the accompanying Naval Air Museum several times during my residency, which had the most compelling collection of naval aircraft I've seen in my life.  I was particularly moved by the use of color and geometric design elements on the aircraft, flight suits, helmets, munitions, etc.  I quoted and excerpted from these unabashedly when I painted the poles in the yard, which ended up as a kind of self-indulgent installation when I finished my residency.

From Bad to Worse to Truly Terrible was a direct quote from a US soldier serving his n-th tour of duty in Iraq.  I wanted the individual parts of this project to be immediate, so I made each by first painting the circular canvases matte black and then pouring gloss black paint over them.  The black on black monochromes that resulted occupy the space somewhere between bullet holes and oil spills.  I wanted the overall installation to approximate a pock-marked wall in a combat zone.

The conceit of this exhibition was the prismatic potential of white light. For the show, I made a kind of white light echo chamber consisting of white paint rolled out onto three sheets of mirrored paper. The approach was straightforward and matter of fact. I wanted to make a work that was both subsumed by and stood apart from the wall. The white paint I selected was the exact same used by the gallery to paint the walls. The edges of the mirrored paper dissolved into the wall depending on the angle of the lighting.

The idea for rolling out paint in this particular piece came from graffiti eradication near my studio. I find it interesting how property owners try to cover up graffiti by sloppily rolling paint over it, never taking much care in the process. Their purpose is just to get rid of the graffiti, irregardless of the final aesthetic results. Usually the new paint is a slightly different value and hue than the original wall color. The result usually ends up looking like a bunch of floating blocks of color on a slightly different colored field, something similar to an An Reinhardt painting.

The title of the work is based on the concept of a sleeper cell, which is a group of agents belonging to a foreign or terrorist organization that lies dormant and unseen inside a population until commanded to act. This was the second white monochrome piece I did on this subject (the first was in Auckland, New Zealand, see below for details).

For my project at SNO, I wanted to focus on the Iraq war and Bush's "Coalition of the Willing", which unfortunately includes Australia, led by conservative Prime Minister John Howard.  The six works I made for the show are part of a new body of work called War Monochromes.  The painting installation was site-specific and the colors were based on those found on the deck of an aircraft carrier (war paint?).  To make the piece, I purchased simple, low profile, ready-made canvases, hung them on the walls, and then sprayed an entire can of spray paint across the face of each.  The spray paint coated the surfaces of the canvases and spread out onto the wall on all four sides, creating a kind of blurry aura.  Graffiti artists refer to their practice as "bombing" and this certainly informed my thinking.  Here, the spray paint hit its target, more or less, much like the munitions dropped by a Navy warplane.

rm103 is a non-profit venue located in a found office space in downtown Auckland.  The walls were kept their original cream color and the floor covered in blue-gray carpet.  The work I contributed to the show was a site-specific painting, a white monochrome.  I purchased a simple, low profile, ready-made canvas, hung it on the wall, and then sprayed an entire can of white spray paint across the face of it.  The spray paint coated the surface of the canvas and spread out onto the wall on all four sides, creating a kind of blurry aura around it.  The work is based on the concept of a sleeper cell, which is a group of agents belonging to a foreign or terrorist organization that lies dormant and unseen inside a population until commanded to act.

I have been thinking a lot about monochrome painting lately, in particular how rigidly dogmatic and downright macho it can be.  I wanted to make a piece that confronted this issue head on and sabotaged it.  I emasculated my monochome by painting it a bubblegum pink and then beating the crap out of it with a hammer, until the piece was literally a shell of its former self.  Unlike Fontana and other precedents who pierced the surface of a painting in a tasteful, aestheticized way, I was determined to make something distasteful, even vulgar.  For me, Pink Nightmare is a kind of exorcism.

White Supremacist Composition is a white monochrome readymade that I purchased in Texas. A sheet of stickers depicting cruxifixes, Jesus fish, and other Christian symbols, the work is a merger of Malevich's Suprematist Composition: White on White painting (in MoMA's collection) and the language of ultra right Christian conservatism (ie, the KKK and white supremacism).

Continuum: In Celebration of 70 Years of American Abstract Artists
St. Peters College Art Gallery, Jersey City, NJ, 2007

This exhibition...Melanie Crader, Matthew Deleget, Mick Johnson & Rossana Martínez
Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston, TX, 2007

Matthew Deleget & Rossana Martínez
H29, Brussels, Belgium, 2006

The four paintings I made for this exhibition were inspired by a Victoria's Secret commercial. In the commercial, a supermodel in glowing bra and panties (Gisele Bundchen, possibly?) is presented head-on cat-walking through Pierre Koenig's Modernist masterpiece Case Study House #22 (1960), with the city lights of a dark Los Angeles as backdrop. The supermodel is surrounded by glass curtain walls, modern furniture, and a swimming pool.  The soundtrack is upbeat rock music.  The image is superhyped, reductive and dazzling.

The horizontal format and inner proportions of these paintings referenced the language of Modernist architecture.  The colors were deliberately hot, sexed up, almost garish, and were intended to reference skin and underwear.  The paintings' titles were deliberately provactive and referenced explicitly sexual songs by artists such as Missy Elliott (Freak On), Prince (Sugar Walls), and others.

The subject of this exhibition was color, which has always been an important tool in my work.  My work is not really about color, but rather uses it as a means to an end.  For the exhibition, I made a suite of six, interrelated paintings, square in format, each consisting of four squares of a single color on a ground of a second color. I intended them to be a self-reflexive set and they were installed in the gallery as such.

On each painting, the squares were distributed like random tiles across an implied grid. No two paintings repeated the same placement of squares, nor the same colors. Each painting consisted of two colors, one earth tone and one highly artifical "plastic" color. I wanted the color combinations to be uncommon, slightly vibrating, and somewhat off-putting.

Making abstract painting is always a defensive position, so I selected titles for the six works that reflect abstraction's outsider status. The specific titles were informed by the volley of insults and other provocative language used by both the Bush administration and Al Queda to describe each other.