Blue Mask

"Monahan's work speaks of long days spent in the studio pulling and pushing materials into new forms and combinations, consumed in traditional sculptural concerns about volume and weightlessness, surface and substrate, and giving life to inanimate substance. He knows, however, that these objects become interesting as art only if they can speak about this process with self-awareness, staying alive by remaining conscious of their own pasts and potential futures. Consequently, his sculptures always seem to threaten to collapse back into formlessness which simultaneously gives them the appearance of disintegrating and being in the process of 'becoming'. This is particularly true of the faces and masks he makes from folded or crumpled paper which exist in anxious awareness that a couple of tugged corners would send them back into two-dimensionality. For Monahan, who describes himself as 'the court painter and the vandal', the process of creation is not so much a battle as a negotiation with entropy, reasoned through erasing, breaking, repairing and combining rather than conjuring something new from the ether" (J. Griffin, "Mathew Monahan" in Frieze Magazine, Issue 110, October 2007.).