Betances 1973-82

John CRASH Matos

January 31st - March 4th 2009

Born in 1961 in New York. Lives and works in New York.

Addict Galerie gets off to a good start the year by the exhibition of John Matos, aka Crash.
He is the main protagonist of the “Aerosol (R)evolution”. Crash is native from the Bronx and when he was thirteen years old, he began to practice the Graffiti on New York subways, before using canvas.
In 1983, he shows his work at the well-known Sidney Janis Gallery, and shortly afterwards, he gets in the most famous worldwide collections, from the MoMA of New York to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Regarded as an icon and actor of the post-graffiti, Crash shows us dynamic and authentic works, faithful to this first American wave which flood into the world.
Indeed, if he is rated as one of the first to develop this “moving gallery” which symbolizes the subway, he belongs too, to these people who leave their name in the heart of the city and engrave it in the Art world.
Crash never stops to offer canvas, persistent testimonies of these moving museums, and by the way he imposes them to the Art History, even if the art of Graffiti was disown.
Crash canvas are more than ambiguous, in fact, by using pictures which look like comics and strong colours which belongs to advertising, his work assert itself as a pure product of the contemporary world.
Nevertheless, by remaining Wesselman and Lichtenstein, his canvases are in the tradition of the Pop Art and raise once again this mass culture as a “work of art”.

“Betances 1973-82”, the latest exhibition of Crash at the Addict Galerie will ask, once again the question of the Graffiti which is on a knife-edge between the art and the social phenomenon.
Crash retraces these steps and analyses the human context which has created the Graffiti by painting his answers: “medium is the message”. All the time, he uses aerosol spray, and he goes over the edges of the canvas to keep the tone of this subversion, thought as the last artistic movement of the XXth century.