GRACE BYDALEK, PUBLICATION, NEW YORK CITY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2022

Last week, Matthijs Scholten sat in the SmithDavidson Gallery at High Line Nine, flanked by works from his inaugural exhibition in New York City. The Dutch painter, who is coming off a whirlwind of international success, looks the part of a seasoned artist — tousled hair, a worn-in leather jacket over a white tee-shirt, work boots, and a cautious, observant gaze.

No one would guess that his career was an accident.

“Four or five years ago,” he told me, “I met a girl at an art fair. I was there by invitation of a friend of mine, just to watch.” She asked if he was a painter, and he told her no. But in a stroke of luck, or of divine intervention, the girl persisted in her questions until Scholten showed her a sample of his work. The colorful, chaotic paintings of abstract faces, reminiscent of a Sex Pistols song, captured something in her.

“She said, “I’m going to arrange for you a show in Russia.” But you know how it goes. Everyone promises you things in life, and 99% of the time, they are false,” Scholten recounted. “A month later, I got a call from a gallery. They said, “we want to do a show with you. Are you in?” I couldn’t believe my ears.”

First was an exhibition in Irkutsk. Moscow, Laren, and Porto Montenegro followed. Then Paris, prestigious art fairs in Holland, and New York City.

“When I paint, I always want to paint in face form, or in a mask with huge eyes. And those eyes, they watch me. They are a reminder of who I am, a reminder to stay close to myself.”

The world’s happy accident was borne of the artist’s unhappiness.

“I always painted as a child, but 10 or 15 years ago, I was reading the newspapers and it made me so sad. Depressed. So I said to myself, I’m consuming all this bullshit. Why? Why shouldn’t I do something, like when I was younger? I started to paint on small papers, and people saw it and they wanted to have it.” So, he gave his work away for free, a practice which he continues to this day.

As he grew as an artist, so did the size and stakes of his work. “When you start on a small paper and you have 10 papers, it’s not a big problem when you mess it up,” Scholten said. “But when you stand in front of a canvas, that’s different. You have only one. And then when you mess it up, you become free because it’s already ruined in your faults.”

“I feel that way with notebooks, too,” I said to him, touching the cover of my journal on the table in front of us. “I’ll spill coffee on it, and then I can finally write.”

The light of mutual understanding flickered across his face and brought him alive. “That’s it!” He picked up my notebook. “That’s exactly the same. You mess it up,” he says, mimicking scribbles on the inside cover, “and now you start to create it.”

To Scholten, the world is a canvas. Born to an entrepreneur father, he is the founder of two companies, the first of which developed a unique recipe for skin friendly ink. “Women, you have your lipstick,” he said. “We have always been using skin as a way to communicate with our surroundings. I give organizations the opportunity to communicate through the skin.”

“I also have a company that makes electric bicycles,” he said, referring to his Harley Davidson inspired second venture. Each bike is handmade by people with disabilities. “There were a lot of companies who couldn’t assemble my bikes. Then, I came across this company. They said, “leave one bike here, completely assembled, and the parts to another” and after two weeks, they had another bike ready. They don’t look at what people cannot do, they look at what they can. It takes a little bit more time, but at the end of the day, you get something beautiful.”

Scholten and I traced the perimeter of the gallery, coming nose to nose with the art. His artistic influences are evident — Pablo Picasso’s abstract shapes and intense colors, little crowns and skulls a la Riding With Death (1988) by Jean-Michel Basquiat. More surprising are his other, less lauded inspirations, like street corners, old buildings, a crust of dried paint from the top of a bottle, which he’s incorporated into one of his nameless works. “My inspiration comes from ugly, dirty things.”