Interview with Deconstructive Pop Artist Matt Gondek | MakersPlace Blog

Matt Gondek is a Deconstructive Pop Artist whose work is possessed with a punk rock spirit, celebrating rebellion and destruction. He tears down cartoon idols with a visceral pop color palette and a disarmingly playful tone, akin to slaughtering our modern-day gods. 

Born in 1982, his creative voice is rooted in the 90s as a true conduit of his generation and their potentially pointless search for meaning and purpose amidst a cruel life in a flawed world. He boasts sold-out exhibitions in his home of Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Bangkok, and Hong Kong.

We spoke with Matt to learn a little more about his upcoming MakersPlace drop, “Fight Club,” a collection of 300 IRL handmade spiked and painted baseball bats with NFT correlates. 

MP: How would you explain Deconstructive Pop if it were taught in art history?

Deconstructive pop art is an extension of two different things. 

The first thing being that if you look at the history of art, there’s always been pop art, it just wasn’t called that at the time. If you look at Renaissance art, Old Masters, all the old stuff that fills museums, you’ll see that artists always painted the thing that was most prevalent in their lives. The Church, religion, royalty. Artists painted what people knew. 

Fast forward to now, there’s no religion, not in the way there used to be. There’s no royalty; not really. Who are our current-day gods? It’s things we all know; it’s Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. 

The second thing that informs Deconstructive Pop is punk rock: the anti-conformity, anti-authority, tearing down the gods kind of attitude. So it’s me destroying the current-day gods. 

To be quite honest, that term came from a guy I did a show with about four or five years ago. At the time, I was just calling it “blowing up heads.” I had no better name for it. I did an art show here in L.A., and the owner asked me, “Hey, what do you call this stuff? Deconstructive pop art?” I thought it was such a clever name that I said, “Yeah, that’s what it’s called.” I’ve been running with it ever since. 

MP: Can you tell me about your custom colors? From what I’ve read, it was a long iterative process. What was the process of creating them?

MG: I’ve always loved bright neon colors. I got my start as a digital illustrator. I did a lot of work in the music industry. And everything was digital. 

After a few years of doing that, I started painting. The problem was I never painted in my life, and I had no idea what I was doing. 

I was just buying house paint at a hardware store. I was trying to mix my own colors to replicate those neon colors I always liked. 

And just from years of practice and mixing and mixing, I finally narrowed it down to colors I was looking for, specifically a certain vibrant, neon-ish pink. It’s hot and it’s cool at the same time. I…