Matt M. Relox is a special artist, devoted to God, to Italian art and to his perseverance and passion for art born when he was still a child drawing with a banana leaf and now he paints subjects that inspire tenderness and love making use of a style between propaganda and retro imagery for an aesthetic that intrigues anyone who observes his works.
Works that exude irony but also hope for a confused and amoral world, in which art often seems to be irreverent and mystifying, at the service of bad taste and the cult of individualism inflated by the contemporary art market. But to say that globalization is flattening everything, and that tradition has disappeared is a lie: children born from the reinterpretation of these two poles can be very interesting, precisely because they trample on limbo, an indefinable threshold in which anything can happen.
Matt M. Relox probably thinks so too. He is certainly not, because of his age, one of the children of these two instances but certainly he loves Tradition and makes art to contemplate God, practicing the power of the Spirit to honor him. The religious factor is relevant in Relox’s artistic path, bearing in mind that the Philippines, whose culture derives from the mixing of foreign influences with indigenous elements, is the only Asian country with a Christian majority, although important Muslim minorities are still present.
The stylistic code of Relox is enclosed in the delicacy and tenderness (as seen from the works Echo park in the heart of Los Angeles, how to fly the kite and Waiting for the date) a soft use of color: ink, watercolor pastel, oil and acrylic. The satisfaction of the result obtained leads the Filipino artist to practice traditional strokes and colors to make use of brighter colors on thin strokes, also using cross hatching on the ink pen. Matt. M. Relox was awarded the Gawad America Award night at the Celebrity Center.
Hollywood in 2019. Matt Relox start painting when he was a kid, he started to get interested in real art of his father. His father showed him how to draw a male head and a shoulder, in a lateral position. That moment captured him, attracted his interest while his father sang interpreting the forms faithful to the lyrics of the song until he finished singing just as the drawing was finished. Matt don’t remember the song. At that point no one could stop him from drawing whenever he wanted, they were on the farm most of the time, so they didn’t have the source of any artistic material to draw on the paper and not even a pencil most of the time. So, he used a banana leaf. On the other side of the leaf there was something like a white thing that you can draw on any subject using anything pointed. Sometimes he made a drawing in the ground, on the wall using a piece of burnt wood, at the end of the stick there is natural charcoal, since then he still hasn’t been able to understand where that dream is going to lead him.
Matt define his art as an appreciation for God and for his own glory. The God who created the whole world, created the incredible beauty of the human being, the inner beauty that we can feel and witness to his greatness, the colors of the universe, the shapes that we can see around us. The beauty of animals, there is no doubt that this is the ultimate reason for him to paint his great creation every time. People change, and change seems to be damaging to people, rivers and even the ocean. In his art, at least, he can try to preserve this truth as a canvas for the benefits of subsequent generations.
Matt can’t deny that he was influenced by our main local artist from the Philippines, he already knows the great Italian masters Michelangelo, Leonardo. He saw their famous paintings in the calendars of the Sistine Chapel, also Leonardo’s La Gioconda masterpiece; at that time he has no idea of the local artists, of their realistic painting, the touch of this artist inspired him and every time he paint he is inspired by him and also by the works of the aforementioned masters.
For more information over Matt, you may visit his Facebook Name Matt M. Relox
