Matthew Rezac

This is a draft from my upcoming book on the new minimalist, brutalist and modernist typographies.

All images courtesy Matthew Rezac

The work of Matthew Rezac is marked by a work-horse typography that is supported by a visually rich approach to printing and photographic art direction. His publication designs especially take advantage of print effects to build upon a core concept. The exhibition catalog for the 01SJ digital biennial Superlight (designed in collaboration with Andrew Blauvelt) avoids the clichés that might be associated with digital art and instead concerns itself with “all things light”. The main typeface is a soft chunky serif that aligns the book with a more universal feel than purely digital art. From there, the book becomes an exploration of light—overprinting on black, tinted varnishes and translucent sheets are all used to explore this idea. Furthermore, the entire book uses the visible spectrum of light as an organizing principle.

Rezac spent two years as a Design Fellow at the Walker Art Center and that influence shows up in Superlight and other publication projects through the use of simple but distinctive typography and material concepts that relate to the content on an elemental level. WARM: A Feminist Art Collective in Minnesota is both a catalog for a 2006 exhibition and a history of the group. WARM originally began as a slide registry of women artists in Minnesota and Rezac shows a selection of those slides on the inside of the dust jacket, but through a clever use of folding the dust jacket also reveals one slide each by the twelve artists in the exhibit. The typography tends toward a mix of loosely connotative typefaces, none screaming too loudly as to its exact intentions. Its this use of typefaces that helps to keep Rezac’s work free of “genre” associations; its not some simple equation of “this typeface=this idea”. Instead its simply a mix of typefaces that organize the book hierarchically. Like Superlight, Rezac use the book’s materiality to support the content, in this instance leaving the binding exposed to show its three color-coded sections.

In a number of works for the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD), Rezac explores typography as a physical presence. Become the MCAD 2007 viewbook transforms the studios, classrooms and galleries of the school into temporary typographic installations through the use of simple laser-printed letters. These were then photographed and used as full-bleed spreads. In an interesting twist, the realism of the photography was contrasted with flat illustrations referencing art-making that acted as holders for more detailed typography.

Throughout his work, Matthew Rezac connects content to form in tangible ways whether using the physicality of print to express concepts or turning a location into a piece of typography. In an already impressive but brief body of work we see these two directions of print and photography investigated and I suspect that future holds more investigation and a greater overlap.

Tagged as: frs, graphic design, matthew rezac, typography