The Brooklyn-based painter Landon Metz has a deft ability to see the micro and the macro. In his meditative visual language, hypnotic pools of dye speak to his canvas and repetitively bleed into the periphery of an object to form patterns — in design and in ritual.
A fascination with how objects, people, and experiences connect led Metz to imagine his work on the human body. He wondered how his paintings – on garments – could have their own way of living in the world. The dynamic relationship between fashion and art is highly relevant to how Metz thinks about being an artist, as he constantly considers how art lives in a space and the feelings it evokes. What if that space was the environment of the wearer?
The Marimekko x Landon Metz capsule collection translates Metz’s visual vernacular to dresses, shirts, skirts, bags, and accessories in striking shades of deep blue and coral red. His organic forms, born from swirling pools of dye, are scaled up, creating fragmented bodies with a hypnotic quality into which you can't help but be pulled. He likens the process of painting the gestures onto the material to a harmonious dance.
“Marimekko went out of their way to embody the spirit of my practice and find printing techniques that don’t just replicate one-to-one, but reveal something about the process and the way materials function together,” says Metz. His hand-painting technique was combined with advanced printing technology at Marimekko’s Helsinki print mill to add another layer of nuance to his language—an exciting evolution in the art of printmaking at Marimekko.
“There's something really beautiful in the space between existence and experience,” says the artist, who grew up in the desert beauty of Arizona before moving to New York to pursue his practice. For Metz, his art extends beyond the bold abstract forms. Each work exists as part of something much larger, acting as a type of “connective tissue”.
A desire to tell the inherent story of a place is something Metz and Marimekko share. They create art, objects, and garments that act as binding threads intrinsic to the life narratives of their viewers and owners.
“Between our projection, our interpretation, and the thing itself, there's a lot of life, and to me, that space is where my work comes from,” he says about his practice. It’s also a space, he believes, for life to reveal itself in the form of subtle quirks, like -isms, accents, and perhaps even dialects.
With this collection, he gets to see a much more intimate relationship between the visual language he’s created and the wearers living in the garments. And so Landon Metz’s singular language continues to evolve.
Artist Series: Landon Metz collection is available exclusively at Marimekko.
