Matthew Brennan IV is the Providence based artist behind Two Thangs. While Two Thangs has been active since June of 2015, Matt has 30 years of experience as a working artist and designer. Two Thangs was relocated from Seattle, where it started, to Boston in July of 2018 and then Providence in 2020.
Basically, you (and I mean YOU personally) give him two ideas from the outside world and he collaborates with you to create an original acrylic painting for your wall. It can be as simple as that or as deep as you’d like to read into it.
My artistic practice operates at the intersection of relational aesthetics, pop iconography, and traditional painting. It sucks that those are three intersections instead of two, BUT that captures a lot of it. For eleven years, my ongoing project, Two Thangs, has functioned as a single, monumental art project that documents human identity through collaborative artmaking. The process begins with a face-to-face invitation: a participant provides two elements of the external world, and together we conceptualize an original acrylic mashup painting. By excluding purely autobiographical subjects (such as relatives or personal property), participants must distill their identities, tastes, and histories into shared cultural signifiers. The resulting paintings function as psychological portraits, capturing a person and a moment in time without relying on physical representation while also sending a flare that is seen and resonates with others.
A crucial component of this practice is its democratic framework. By maintaining a low financial barrier, the work actively subverts the exclusivity of the contemporary art market and engages people that feel intimidated or excluded by that space. For many of the hundreds of collaborators I have worked with this process represents their primary entry point into original art ownership. My work intentionally leverages a shared cultural vernacular rooted in collective memory and pop iconography to represent individuals and connect them. This may be the celebrity of a favorite movie or a personal song, but it can also just be as simple as a door knob or a cheeseburger or as complex as a philosophy or religion. This familiar language acts as an immediate handshake, dismantling the alienation that frequently distances the public from contemporary art and people from each other.
However, this recognizable subject matter is merely the introduction to a deeper aesthetic relationship. By liberating my practice from the obligation of what to paint, I retain control over how the image is executed. I design these paintings for sustained, long-term viewing and have developed a unique style that sits between expressionism, surrealism, realism and expressive markmaking. These are made to be looked at in your home over decades and not just passed by in moments. Over time, the pop-culture narrative recedes, guiding the viewer toward a formalist appreciation of the texture, composition, and medium that I gelled together.
When I receive two ideas, I combine them in multiple ways trying to find the connective tissue between the concepts. The collaboration then pushes and pulls that connection to find where it lives for the person that chose the ideas. This means that they chose the ‘what’, I chose the ‘how’ but the ‘why’ is also something trying to be captured. The purpose of the painting being created speaks to how the commissioning party sees art and what they want out of it. It also allows me the flexibility to create images that are fun while creating some that aren’t fun under one body of work. The gamut of what I’ve painted is deep, not only in subject matter but emotional resonance. I paint images that immediately evoke laughter but also pieces that are meant to capture the disappointment of a hard time in life. The scope of the entire body of work is my journey and by collaborating, I’m always brought something new.
The project does not conclude with the original painting. Through social media and affordable reproductions, these hyper-specific collaborative portraits enter global digital and physical distribution networks. In doing so, a localized interaction is transformed into a decentralized, collective archive. I have seen a painting commissioned by a 6 year old from a city in the Pacific Northwest reach the heart of a military vet from rural New England. They both brought their own experiences to the image but that work connected them without ever meeting. It is the power of the shared language of culture.
Ultimately, Two Thangs is an evolving, crowd-sourced sociological study. It will continue to grow and I will continue to grow as an artist with it for its entire existence. It stands as a testament to human connection, proving that no matter how obscure or hyper-specific an individual's cultural coordinates may seem, the visual language of our collective environment possesses a universal capacity to unite us.