Contrasting the global, pandemic-enforced trend of living life through technology instead in person, Matthew Couper's exploration of what social isolation might look like starts from an island in the middle of the ocean. For the artist, desert islands and desert proper are both metaphors for survival and reflect a bigger picture of what survival means on the scale of the world and humanity as a whole, and how we live (or don’t live) in interdependency with others in a society.

‘Couper is an artist with a Kafkaesque view of the world’ - art critic John Seed

Couper's art, spurred on by hostile desert dwelling, oscillate between didactic talismans of impending anthropocenic doom to more insular and psychological spaces. Paintings describe desert mesa psycho-scapes and murky sea-surrounded islands, presided over hovering tools of survival and make-shift shelter, all while reveling in aesthetic constructive chaos. This psychological space, both in the artist’s mind and on the painted surface, is the opposite of a specific location. They are an amalgam of places past and present - vistas of a homemade paradise constantly in flux.

Much like Couper’s homeland set on the Pacific Ring of Fire, even the islands and headlands are subject to change, distortion and relocation due to continuing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The term ‘desert island’ reconnects his two homes back together in paint.

Matthew Couper is an Aotearoa/New Zealand born artists living and working in the USA.