Like the Spice Gallery is delighted to present Matt Stone and his first solo exhibition “Tectonics”, opening June 24th, 2011. Stone has affixed his gaze upon  geological, geometric and botanic involution. His deeply layered sculptures are riddled with an expanse of materials, ranging from neon foam to cardboard florets, tendrils of resin, and tattered webs of spandex. Large, freestanding sculpture and small  singular satellite objects intermingle fluidly on the walls, floor and ceiling. Stone’s sculpture balances the obscenities of the environment with flirtatious, and strikingly calculated, ingenuity. 

Stone's pillars are imbued with an unflinching plasticity. Tiny colored pins cluster and grow beneath swooping resin and conglomerations of triangles. Soft foam coalesces with rigid floral shapes, in one precarious shrine to nature's precision. These hyperbolic coral reefs snub the contradiction of their interiors. Stone's sculpture prompts zooming in and slowing down. Micro and macro components guide the viewer around and into the work, highlighting the organic forms of Stone's excavations o  f man-made materials. Geometry, particularly fractal geometry, infuses each work with a formal language despite the nebulousness of the sculpture’s forms. 

The veracity of Matt Stone's color palate is a constant in his recent work. The exciting, exotic hues avoid his weathered platforms that support several of the sculptures. Color, at first, appears to be the singular link between the previously discussed sculptures and his more elementary, overtly geometric wooden wall-gems. The predominately wooden diamonds  expand across the wall in a small colony, stuffed like a jelly donut with neon foam and sliced to reveal swirling interiors. Each settlement flaunts a cantilevered geological configuration. The supportive grid stresses the symbiotic relationship between the formal and conceptual, the "pattern emerging out of chaos." Stone is committed to spotlighting both the flamboyant finale and spartan skeleton of form.  

The multitude of layering in Stone's work absorbs the senses. His sculptures are radioactive. Technicolor goo, sharp lines, and a sea of duplicates diffuse into organic comrades. Stone often compares his work to evolutionary processes and a internal mimetics , consisting of many building blocks depending on the degree of simplification or analysis. His works are similarly a "corporeal history of action," constantly building and transfiguring through observation and experience. 

Matt Stone was born in Elkins, West Virginia in 1979.  He graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in 2003 and received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2010. Stone has participated in many group shows including exhibitions at Allen Nederpelt, Rupert Ravens Contemporary, the Aqua art fair of Miami Art Basel, Perry Rubenstein, Parlor in Brooklyn NY and Lingam at the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht. Stone currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.