ART
Matt Stasyuk: Causes and Objects
Matt Stasyuk
Artist
Modern digital artist Matt Stasyuk breaks all the stereotypes of how a modern artist should be formed and inspired. Stasyuk's works are images of localised processes, riddles, bizarre collages, and inexplicable combinations of incompatible things. His works are a success in galleries around the world; critics note the high professionalism of the artist; and subscribers do not skimp on likes and reposts of his works on social networks. The genealogy of Matt's artistic voice and the sources of his inspiration are of great interest.

Stasyuk's artistic practise is a complex hybrid of critical perception and reinterpretation of underground American culture and universalist cross-cultural modern approaches to the production of actual gestures, meanings, and objects. Matt works within the paradigm of rethinking the boundaries between digital and analogue art. His digital works refer to traditional genres: still life, subject composition, and figurative collage.
However, the roots of Stasyuk's creative method lie not in the field of gallery art but in the achievements of modern American theatrical avant-garde drama. Matt makes dramatic concepts the achievements of modern visual art. Extremely minimalistic existential plays of the new wave of American drama (Victoria Z. Daily, Brynn Hambley, Anna Langman, Jeff Dunne, and Farzana Datta) become the starting points for the birth of new art works by Matt Stasyuk. They are related by minimalism of composition, asceticism of expressive means, absurd plot, objects of the real world, non-theatricality, and eschatological atmosphere. Matt's works can also be called plays to some extent. Visual plays. So far, there is no theatre that could stage such plays. In this sense, Stasyuk's works can be compared to a utopian prophecy, which carries a consistent institutional critique of modern cultural institutions, which are actually closed to everything new. Really new.

Matt Stasyuk is also an artist who constantly reinvents himself. In his works, he reveals himself as a visionary, a humorist, a social critic, a visionary, a blogger, a professional, and a layman. This sliding through identities allows him to uncover the gaps in the meanings and ways of the artist's existence in society. Matt is an outstanding, mature, and paradoxical artist. On the one hand, his works amaze with their thoroughness and professionalism; on the other hand, his creative philosophy conquers with freshness, simplicity, childlike spontaneity, and ease. Of particular interest is his series of digital animated works that balance on the edge between a joke and a warning. Stasyuk knows how to hide anxiety and a complex message with a user-friendly shell. His work is multifunctional. They can be perfectly used as interior paintings, as gallery exhibits, as screensavers, as references for futurological fiction, or as pictures for psychotherapy. The versatility of Matt Stasyuk deserves infinite respect and admiration.

13.02.2023
Clara Smith