Attard’s forms metamorphose into space, arising from a thick black line, halfway between drawing and sculpture. The young artist designs the space, creating architectural forms from black metal wires that pierce sheets of Plexiglas. What the viewer will catch at a glance once he cerebrally reconstructs the presented “images”, are female bodies lying in uninhibited postures; bodies and postures which become strangely familiar to us when put in context of the abundance of figure images we see in our daily contemporary life. These bodies are suspended in air as if engaged in a struggle against the forces of gravity whilst the public is invited to circulate amongst the dismembered bodies in a play of deconstruction and reconstruction. Depending on the viewpoint, the sculptures disassemble and reassemble themselves.
This visual play between abstract and rational figurative views, is physically the result of the drawing, materialised through the wire, and stretched into space. The spectator is automatically invited for a slow individual observation experience. In Matthew Attard’s work we can grab a sense of the contemporary phenomenon of externalized intimacy in a society dominated by the increased use of social networks, where each person posts intimate and narcissistic pictures. We live in the era of the Selfie favoured by technological and social advances, resulting in a widespread tendency to tell the story of one’s own life through intimate photos posted on social networks. The private sphere and the public sphere are no longer delimited, but merge into one, an era where one would question the existence of intimacy. The intimate photographs on social media refer to a constructed reality, an expression of one’s ego –oriented towards the public gaze. These ‘slices’ of life represented by the Selfie, are echoed in the young artist’s work in his ‘slicing’ of the human body in sculptures spread throughout the empty spaces.
