Matt Dillon

L'Almanach 26 : Matt Dillon

Matt Dillon (1964, New Rochelle, USA)

Born in 1964 in New Rochelle, New York, Matt Dillon has developed a practice situated at the intersection of cinema, writing, and the visual arts. His painting does not constitute a separate or late chapter of his work, but rather one of the spaces in which a different relationship to images is played out: their circulation, displacement, and successive transformations.

His work can therefore be understood through a logic of transfer, in which signs and figures move from one regime to another—from cinema to comics, from popular culture to art history, from travel memories to visual archives—without ever settling into a definitive form. These displacements are also linked to the heterogeneity of supports, formats, and materialities, moving between paper, canvas, wood, and textile. In Flash Gordon (after uncle Alex), Dillon revisits a figure from popular culture created by his great-uncle, Alex Raymond. Yet the work does not function as a simple act of appropriation or homage. Rather, it highlights the way an image can pass through generations, changing medium and status while retaining its capacity to be reactivated within heterogeneous contexts.

Dillon’s paintings and drawings are often organized according to principles of stratification, overlaying, and montage. 

Their surfaces preserve traces of their own making: fragments persist beneath other layers, as though multiple states of the image coexisted within the same space. 

This construction through sedimentation echoes a logic akin to collage, understood here not as a technique but as a method of circulation, arrangement, and migration.

This migration is also evident in works produced partly in Africa, most recently in Senegal during the filming of Le cri des gardes by Claire Denis. Geographical displacement accompanies the displacement of the images themselves, which shift in context, visibility, and meaning while never ceasing to circulate through multiple layers of visual memory.

Tribute to Wallace (Wallace Berman) condenses this dynamic. By translating into painting what belongs to the realm of assemblage, Dillon blurs the distinctions between collage and painted image, between citation and transformation. The tribute to the artist Wallace Berman extends beyond a historical reference: it points toward a conception of the image as a mobile entity, shaped by repetition, detours, and successive reinscriptions.