opens Saturday Nov 23rd, 2024, 8-10pm
closing Saturday Jan 11th, 2025, 12-2pm

304 w Crest Ave, Tampa FL 33603

Strigiforms marks Matthew’s second solo exhibition with Coco Hunday. 

Initially drawn from the immediate surroundings of his Tampa home, Walter’s paintings drift into an epic of magical realism. Subjects seem to awaken with sentience, embarking on hallucinatory journeys that intertwine pleasure and conspiracy. Through this transformation, the ordinary dissolves into a realm where desire and paranoia bleed freely.

On the occasion of the closing reception for Strigiforms, Coco Hunday and Matthews have collaborated on a permanent Camera Obscura aperture to the garage door of Gallery 1. During daytime hours, viewers will be able to experience a ghost image of the outside world, layered onto and around, the works situated in Gallery 1. As the outside comes in–upside down and backward–familiar subjects both inside and out become further estranged and ecstatic.

In addition, we are thrilled to publish an interview with Walter by Tom Winchester (Arts Writer, Educator, and Director of artcritter.com) on the day of our closing reception, along with a reflection on the exhibition. More of Walter’s work can be found on instagram @walter_maths. Viewings are by appointment only, please email HERE.

CLOSING RECEPTION: Saturday, January 11th, 12-2pm, Coco Hunday, 304 w Crest Ave, Tampa 33603

EXHIBITION REVIEW (Tom Winchester of www.artcritter.com) down below >

Gallery 1

PASSENGER
11×14.5”
Oil on panel
Webb
30×40”
Oil on canvas
Untitled
16×20”
Oil on canvas
Sunday Morning
36×36”
Oil on canvas

Gallery 2

Remote Viewer
30×40”
Oil on canvas
Front Gate
Oil on canvas
21×25”
Orb
Oil on canvas
14×18”
A silent arrival
24×36”
Oil on canvas
on the occasion of the closing reception for Strigiforms, Coco Hunday and Walter Matthews have collaborated on adding a permanent Camera Obscura aperture to the garage door of Gallery 1.

REVIEW OF STRIGIFORMS / Tom Winchester of artcritter.com

Strigiforms currently on view at Coco Hunday is an exhibition of magically realistic paintings by Walter Matthews. Scenes of everyday Tampa are depicted with impressionistic brushstrokes and saturated colors; some neon. Car windows become portals to new universes, tree leaves turn into vortices, a spiderweb frames a cell’s organelles. An infinite world is suggested even in the most banal of scenes, and magic appears everywhere. 

Webb (2024) depicts a rear end of an SUV in the driveway of a nighttime cul-de-sac. It has the energy of a Dr. Katz cartoon in that you can swear it squiggles as your eyes bounce around the canvas. Its composition is similar to a vertical photograph taken using a cell-phone camera with optical distortions skewing objects into the corners, and its colors are strangely saturated with that glow of LED phosphor degradation. With a centralized focus, the middle of the painting is rendered with detail, but the further toward the edges of the canvas the more abstract Matthews’s gestures become. 

Front Gate (2024) is a glowing spider web. It radiates yellows and oranges in an outwardly segmented pattern with vacancies of murky sludge. Each segment looks like a pod of energy that could be as expansive as a universe. It appears to sparkle with points of white and cyan, and its background encloses and recedes to darkness. There’s no spider. Just a web waiting to ensnare unsuspecting travellers. 

The exhibition’s title refers to the taxonomical order of birds of prey to which owls belong, but takes creative license in its spelling for the purpose of transmuting the term into an artistic context. It presents the works in the exhibition as specimens of a certain genus that vary in their identities while maintaining a shared DNA. All have an impressionistic quality, but the level of detail versus abstraction varies from piece to piece. 

The mascot of the exhibition is a small painting of an owl titled PASSENGER (2024). It’s a rigidly composed, vertically inclined, minimal depiction of a barn owl that forms from just a few swaths of violet. The owl appears to be looking directly at us with the ominous stare of a mystical familiar, and it moves across the slim canvas so fast that its features are mere impressions. They form just enough for us to recognize what is and then it’s gone. By narrowing its chromatic range to just two main shades, the painting champions the exhibition’s signature color saturation. It’s a unique species in the exhibition in that it excludes any areas with focused rendering, so its magic is what makes it exemplary of Matthews’s style.

Coco Hunday is the perfect gallery to view this body of work because it’s in the neighborhood of Seminole Heights in Tampa. It’s a rare art-gallery pairing that exhibits the art where it was made. Coco Hunday is also conceived with the same humility of Matthews’s paintings in that both are approachable and welcoming. Both seem to work against the systems of the art world that create a division between those who know what they’re talking about and those who don’t. Whereas viewing Stringiforms at Coco Hunday feels more like a backyard BBQ with your best friends.