Matthew Rose is an American artist living and working in Paris, France. A graduate of Brown University, Matthew has exhibited his all-over collage installations which he calls “Spelling With Scissors” across the US and Europe. He is the creator of the global project A Book About Death and since 2009 the project has been exhibited more than 20 times across the world. Slashstroke tracked him down to find out, well as much as we possibly could about him.

/-: Matthew, describe what you do, say on a daily basis?
Rose: I get up in the morning and take a piece of 1940s 1950s or 1960s PR and cut it with big knife or pair of scissors dripping with love, producing a bit of sugar from 1970 or so when I was an adolescent and chasing my girlfriend around a lake during the summer at night. I’m more of a cut and paste addict than anything else, trying to manage the detritus that drags me into its church, or the discards and homeless and wanderers washing up on my shore, looking to get organized. Like all maniacal men, and some mothersville-type women, I deliver meaning in a meaningless world. It’s all very religious. Like a baptism, a bar mitzvah, a pilgrimage, a deep pensive bow to the void with a clip and some glue. So, in my view – my little Weltanschauung – I stop war, end disease, unbridle unhappiness, reverse death and replace it with sunshine and fresh fruit, good safe sex and cancer-free cigarettes. Although things don’t always go as planned.  These ‘works’ want out, sometimes. So we struggle, fight, argue. Like in all marriages. 
How did you arrive at this?
I came to collage very early on. As a toddler I liked holding up bits of colored paper to the blue sky and making curious combinations before I ate the bits of paper. Early pantone system. Then I discovered comic books and their papers, the Benday dot printing, smelly inks, viscous paints, scissors of all sizes, words of all flavors, pencils long and short and an odd number (quite a few) of people called ‘artists’ who spent years and years constructing whole worlds out of stuff they found or scribbled or made up.  When I was nine years old I starting mapping out my family: who was who and why? It was very painful to produce carto-graphics of my family members, but there was in the end a truth in the activity of making the dotted lines, the boxes, the circles, the captions. I grew up and sought out different things to map out, cut up, scribble about: girls, politics, space, sex, desire, death. The technical wonder of a piece of paper and a pencil, however, has never left me. 
Is this easy or hard?
It’s very hard. Like Sisyphus and the rock. 
“Why are you an artist?” people ask. I say, “I like the hours.”  And I do.  I always work.  It’s hard not to work. I can’t remember the last time I took a vacation and enjoyed myself. The hard part is going closer and closer to the edge and not falling off.  Some years ago I made a series of 100 “scribble” drawings and spent about two hours on each burning up crayons and pencils and grease markers sometimes getting so deeply into the act of racing into the paper with my pencil I tore several apart or just screamed because I was losing it.  In the end, I found all this necessary.  The hard part is knowing you’re a little crazy.  The easy part is when people come up to you and say, “I love you and you rock.”
What do you like?
Scuff marks on the floor, skid marks on the street, torn and wet discarded children’s drawings, piles of old abandoned magazines, aged advertisements for cakes and cars or shaving lotion, the stack of Hebrew grammar books from the 1940s which I once found tossed in the middle of a Tel Aviv street, perfectly-made objects that have no apparent use, empty cigar boxes, blocks of beeswax, rusted bits of torn metal, logos for companies that no longer exist, typography, doodles, footprints, cyphers (and ciphers), the artworks of Joseph Cornell, Jasper Johns and Ray Johnson (in that order) the possibilities of sandpaper, steel wool and a year’s weather on one of my canvases, the act of finding something completely unwanted (and apparently useless), taking it home, applying some glue or paint, a bit of cutting and shaping, and marrying it with some other orphaned bit of the world and witnessing this Pinocchio-like Lazarus rise to let me know what I might need to know. I like spelling with scissors, my handbook of everything, the collage of people doing what they do (often nothing) … and working whatever little magic I have to refashion the unmistakable into something mysterious.  One of each of everything.
What don’t you like?  
Loud yabbering about the obvious.
Tell us about the current project you are working on. What is your current source of inspiration?
Right now (this minute) I’m producing about a dozen red star on yellow canvas gouache paintings.  I’m not quite sure where I will show these – perhaps just the web – but I have always loved the combination of a yellow field and a red figure. Both in the “cadmium category,” the yellow fairly radiates and the red sucks you in.  Of course, this is a symbol of communism, Chinese style, but as small paintings on canvas, with the gouache fairly caked on … I guess I’m still working the 1950s in a 21st century way.  My mother, who was wonderful, created a needlepoint of my design in yellow and red of the word “COMMUNISM.” I’ve exhibited it all over. I would have liked to have sold it when she was alive so I could have given her half the money.  As for the red stars, I should really make 1000 of these.  Perhaps I’ll need to hire an assistant.
What would you change about your industry, your work, yourself?
My industry has a problem. There is no place for the living, non-photogenic, marginal, third-world artist.  What the – industry (art fairs, galleries, museums, collectors, all sorts of dealers) want are: Dead white artists whose work is recently discovered and now safely in the hands of the powerful movers and shakers who have the best interests of the art in mind. How would I change that?  I suppose the best way to do it is to enlarge an empowered collector class.  Make everyone a collector.  Probably not possible. Desirable? Well, I don’t know. 
My work? I’d like to start painting masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Homer, Mondrian, de Kooning next week.  And I’d like to do lots of these in my own way. And people can say, “Oh look, Matthew Rose…Check out his boogie-woogie and all that stuff there.” I’d also like to start working larger. Pieces that mirror my entire body. Like Pollock’s approach to scale. Making a wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-floor-to-ceiling installation from 1000 pieces is hard work.  I should look into producing wall paper.
Me? I’ve been talking to many of my friends telling them I need to get married already and have kids and teach them the system of organising my work in various piles so that when Armageddon comes, they’ll know which way the wind is blowing.  And they can pay for college.  
What is the process from idea to art work?
Process is all. Change is everything.  The key to it all is to disrupt, cut up, change it around.  Don’t be afraid to murder to create, but don’t take T.S. Eliot’s line into the highly unethical and sick Nazi zone, as many have done.  We’re talking about consciousness, not Buchenwald. Back to the subject: Change becomes hard because we seem to be hardwired to do the same thing every day, Richard Corey and IBM.  Reinventing your life on a daily basis is probably the hardest of all projects in life because the further away you row from the dock, the closer you come to Théodore Géricault  (the painter) and living out your predicament on his Raft of the Medusa.
Is there always an audience in mind for these works of yours? Do you envision a market? 
No, not at all.  I’ve always said that I make these things so I can see what they look like – to understand what I understand and know what I know.  The audience has come late to the project I began when I was about five years old and mapping out my family.  It’s interesting to see these folks, and very curious when they toss money at me.  Now with the Internet, it’s all PayPal. 
But the audience is very interesting because I’m working with them, collaborating with them, exchanging with them. Like Ray Johnson would say of his “meetings” or “nothings” these gatherings end up being a a collage of people.  And therein lies the correspondence.  It’s a bit of living theatre, all of it, and most of it not very important in the end, but it does make up a life, doesn’t it?  
I think I covered this in many ways, specifically the “free” aspect in the ongoing, global project, A Book About Death). Success has to come from you and your world making sense of the insanity of this world. And making something beautiful.  That’s not easy.  It’s The Catcher In The Rye when J.D. Salinger alone had the manuscript in his hands; it’s Van Gogh’s Bedroom when he finished it and smelled the paint as it dried; it’s even Richard Long, along in a field, gazing at the line he just made by walking. Take a look at Berninin’s Apollo and Daphne at the Galleria Borghese in Rome and tell me that’s not a kind of perfection, rare and spectacular and in the end, terribly sad that it’s so beautiful.
If money wasn’t an issue what would you do, what would you produce or not do?
I’d get a warehouse in New York, another in Paris and another in London (all with showers and kitchens) and make much larger things. I’d experiment more (if that’s possible) because there are so many things I want to see that have never been made before. For example, I’d like to make a thousand posters with the text: 

IL FAUT TOUT FAIRE

http://matthewrosestudio.net/Matthew_Rose_Collage_Drawing_Editions.html