'Les Affaires' is a like a mall from hell and high water. The large work on masonite, a combination of collage and paint with some 3-D passages, is a surreal tour through the commercial center of my mind's eye. Les Affaires brings consumption and all its myriad expressions to a neat explosion. Here, Freud (lower left corner) considers the expansive narratives from behind a silhouette of Popeye-as-Buddah. A family ponders a side of beef, a salesman dangles a naked blue girl in offering from his battery-as-desk (a housewife's head). A child's arms are weighed on a scale. One of a large pair of hands beholds a fashion plate – her own head morphed into a construction of pipes topped by a fan – while the other hand readies a pen for signing over something of value.

Indeed value is explored and remade as acts of gloating, comedy and narcissistic wonder and feeding. The enormous collage takes 'business as usual' to startling new heights and frighteningly new depths. "I live on a market street in Paris. This happens every day.


This work was also featured in MASTERS: COLLAGE (Lark Books/2010).

Prints available: http://www.keepcalmgallery.com/artists/matthew_rose/_all