Cabin Fever: Matthew Cole’s interiors, where the outside world turns inward

Matthew Cole lives and works in New York. A painter with a sharp instinct for atmosphere and narrative tension, Cole graduated with a BFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University (Philadelphia) in 2010—an academic foundation that has since evolved into a practice defined by psychologically charged spaces and quietly unsettling familiarity.

Over the past decade, Cole has built an international exhibition history that traces his growing preoccupation with place, memory, and the emotional weight carried by everyday environments. Recent solo presentations include Alexander Rutsch Award Presentation at Pelham Art Center, New York (2021), House Man at Galerie L’inlassable, Paris (2019), and Tokyo to Berlin at Silas von Morisse Gallery, New York (2019). His work has also appeared in notable group exhibitions such as Room Service at Hotel Ruth, Stockholm (2021), Ten Years at Galerie L’inlassable, Paris (2021), and Paperworks Vol. 1 at NBB Gallery, Berlin (2021).

Now, in his first exhibition with BEERS London, Cabin Fever, Cole turns his attention to the interior as both subject and psychological stage. The American artist translates the external world into uncanny paintings of domestic spaces—rooms that feel lived-in, yet suspended; familiar, yet slightly out of joint. These are not simply depictions of interiors, but environments that hold tension like weather: quiet, gathering, and charged.

The exhibition follows an invitation to an artist residency in Canada—an experience that, by Cole’s own trajectory, reshaped the direction of his studio practice. Travelling to Newfoundland, specifically Pouch Cove along the rugged North Atlantic coastline, he set out to disrupt his routines and reorient his gaze outward. What he did not anticipate was how deeply that landscape would imprint itself—only to return transformed, turning inward once he was back in the studio.

Rather than producing direct landscapes, Cole reinterprets the intensity of the coast through narrative-driven compositions that prioritise domestic settings. In these works, the natural world becomes an emotional undertow, felt more than seen. The shift suggests something intimate: a yearning for the inevitable, a pull toward spaces just beyond reach—thresholds, corners, rooms that seem to contain what cannot be said plainly.

Cole’s paintings also draw from Atlantic Canada’s cultural traditions of song and storytelling, and that influence is palpable in the way his scenes unfold. Each work reads like a fragment of a larger tale—quietly dramatic, psychologically loaded, and threaded with motifs that feel deeply personal while remaining strangely universal. There is an uncanny familiarity here: the sense that you have been in these rooms before, even if you cannot place where or when.

BEERS Director Kurt Beers, who hails from the nearby province of New Brunswick, reflects on the emotional pull of Cole’s work: “Matthew’s pieces are profoundly transportive; they retain a quiet power that draws us in through texture, mood, and place, while evoking nostalgia with sensitivity and authenticity.”

Cabin Fever is on view at BEERS London until 27 June. For further information, please visit the gallery’s website.