Black Square
Artwork Description
| Black Square is part of a long-term series of large scale abstract painting, assemblage, sculpture, print. sound design and drawing titled ‘Fuck Trump’. It’s a project that continues a personal engagement with dissent by practice. Each piece, every act is a small external manifestation of hope, and a rejection of hate and fear. It’s how Matta continues their practice while confronted with the existential carnival of despair and carnage we are subjected to. As a counterpoint to this cognitive dissonance, Matta is currently developing inter-disciplinary collaborative projects with non-professionals and fellow artists as a central thesis of their practice, under the umbrella project Humans Against Cruelty: 4 Kindness. Interpretative tex for exhibition label ‘Black Square 2026’ mixed media on board. Walk with me… I want you to deploy your mental imaging faculties to imagine the tonal opposite of the painted surface you see before you. What is white is black, and vice versa. The black tag is now white on a black background. Got it? Hold it in your mind. That’s the artwork… You complete me. |
Taking the premise that the self is an illusion, Matta operates as a fluid collective - a series of creative constructs forged through diverse roles across the creative industries. Influenced by embryology and evolutionary theory, the work develops through a stochastic, bottom-up process of drawing and painting that responds dynamically to chance, lyrical mark-making. Complexity emerges from simplicity - echoing Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful” - where infinite variation is tempered only by the vernacular of the human form. Pragmatically, Matta’s goal is that of an examined practice grounded in curiosity and vulnerability. It is not a search for absolute answers, but a commitment to perpetual inquiry, centered on the evergreen question: What is art? Here, the Sisyphean role of the contemporary artist is to continually contest and reframe the value and function of art within an ever-shifting culture. In relation to the theme Power of Two, the project interrogates collaboration within artistic practice. The work fully activates only when the viewer steps into the role of an imaginative participant, effectively completing the circuit. The objective is to transcend the passive gallery relationship between maker and observer, pushing beyond the conventional physical artifact. Art does not reside solely in the object, but within a shared cognitive space. As a holographic cultural construct, art is a mental activity given plastic form through craft and technology; by fixating predominantly on physical materiality, we risk losing sight of art’s true locus. Through Black Square, the intention is to consciously bridge the temporal divide - fostering a direct collaboration between minds.
Matta
| A graduate of the Manchester School of Art and The University of Salford, Matta is a cross-discipline, multi-sensory artist with a lifelong background in professional video production, music and mural/street art. Matta describes his personal art practice (fusing elements of punk, funk, jazz and folk) as ‘graffiti adjacent’ - the history of paint over the surface and explosive colour responses echoing the palimpsest of rich textural/textual layers, both intentional and unintentional, found in an urban landscape still haunted by the ghost of Vaughn Bodé’s calligraphy and cartoons. Appearing on most visual pieces of Matta’s work, the D:Siva ‘tag’ is a reference to the graffiti adjacent nature of his practice, but is also a coded reference, formed from a corruption of an equation relating to the concept of entropy: S0 “Delta S is equal to or greater than 0”. Understanding entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a central theme explored in Matta’s praxis. |