Paradise, Contemporary Oil Landscape Text Painting by Matt Higgins

Details

Description

This series began in 2022 and has continued to evolve. These new oil paintings carry a heightened sense of depth … Read more This series began in 2022 and has continued to evolve. These new oil paintings carry a heightened sense of depth and material presence, offering a particularly focused expression of the series.

These paintings stage paradise as both image and illusion—something declared as much as it is depicted. The repeated presence of the word “PARADISE,” rendered in urgent, almost naive lettering, functions less as a description and more as a proposition: a promise that feels insistent, even doubtful. The landscapes beneath—palm trees, distant mountains, dark water, and moonlit skies—evoke the familiar language of escape, recalling tourist imagery and inherited visions of Eden. Yet their construction resists stillness or perfection.

Like a vacation, paradise is presented as a constructed elsewhere, a place we project onto in order to momentarily step outside of time. But the paintings insist that time does not disappear. Mortality remains embedded within the image, quietly present even in the most vibrant and idyllic scenes. The palm tree leans, the horizon fractures, the darkness presses in.

Matt Higgins b. 1987 is both an artist and an art professor based in Philadelphia, PA. He engages in a consistent studio practice, with a primary focus on painting across various bodies of work. He received his BFA from West Chester University in 2011 and his MFA from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2017. Along with maintaining a regular studio practice, he teaches as a university professor. His art is included in numerous private collections and has been featured in a diverse range of interior design projects, spanning residential properties, corporations, and hotels. Both his home and studio are located in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife and kids. See less