Matthew Deleget

War Monochromes, 2007-2009
Monochrome paintings, red, black, green, fluorescent orange, silver and yellow spray paint on canvas and wall
16 x 12 inches each

Exhibitions:
Matthew Deleget - War Monochromes
Sydney Non Objective, Sydney, Australia, 2007

Matthew Deleget - War Monochromes
Project Space Spare Room, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 2009

For my project at SNO, and later at RMIT, 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.