As a figure painter I am acutely aware that who and how you paint are not problems solved by the abundant supply of images in contemporary culture, it is a problem of developing a friction point between the motif (who) and the painting (how). I paint men, women, children those in between and creatures who defy categorisation. There are numerous interlocking themes from light to explosions and a relationship to pattern as a form of cultural coding. People are my subject, they are not real in any historical sense. They are ideas, ideas of people, images who seek to be unpictured,  refusing to be both likeness and idol. I only ask that their presence is corporal enough to be a challenge to our assumptions and allusive enough to defy capture.

It's all in the joints; ball, socket, mortise, tenon, lap or dovetail. We join to create strength or give movement. Language creates joints in our expectation of meaning it creates order and stability giving a context for ritual and rights' of passage. But what happens when our limbs are broken and severed? What happens when alien materials are butted up in the hope that they will take and not become septic and in need of complete removal? It is then that we look to the art of the joint maker and the intervention of prosthesis to transform its workings. This could be seen as an act of replacement, but that would be to create an unnecessary illusion. What is needed is not mimesis, but invention, the possibility of movement and the flexibility to give life to a body maimed.

I make joints, joints in character and narrative, not portraits or stories, but a suture in the skull and gut of culture. I take the catgut of paintings bowel skin and stitch the prosthetics of our world with the remnants and detritus of myth and religion. Recent work has included a series of paintings of saints and prophets. 'Portraits of desire' they ask what desire might be and how it looks. What are its goals and how does it speak of its needs or wants. A saint, like painting, works with extremes - from the micro to the macro, the personal to the cosmic, and the natural to the supernatural. They are both person and symbol fact and legend.  Their desire for wholeness can mean bodily mutilation and martyrdom, creating a visual paradox that refuses to bow to the demands of reason. The word symbol has perhaps suffered the same fate as the saints and gods, derived from the Greek word Symballein, 'to throw together'. It is more commonly used in modern form to mean a shape or object which represents a person, idea or value. The modern 'symbol' may have great marketing potential, but, has lost the playfulness and invention which characterises its origins.

These are saints thrown together, stitched and grafted with latex, flesh and hair. Filled with air they are in a state of tension between phenomena and the spirit. Ready to pop, their elasticity is stretched to reveal their metaphorical possibilities. Their limbs exist to extend beyond their pragmatic function. Outsized and outstretched, their biology is the result of the barber's floor and the party shop catalogue.  They are not meant to merely replace old orders but to give purpose back to broken and missing limbs.

Matthew Burrows 2009