MATTHEW PANG

Ulrik is pleased to present a new body of work by Matthew Pang at Paris Internationale.

In this series of diamond-shaped wall paintings, eyes appear contiguous with, and simultaneously hidden behind, vertical bars. Titled after various permutations of the words bar, eye, and diamond, these works stage the entrapment of painting between surface, depth, and support. Surface, as striated by bars that pulse, scan, intercept, and disrupt; depth, receding into the pool of a murky retina; and support, the irregular diamond that reminds us—as did Frank Stella, François Morellet, and Michael Fried—that a picture is a shaped thing.

Pang’s canvases call into question the function of the edge, the feeling of the line, and the (w)hole at the center of representation. Extending beyond the hermetic autoanalysis of painterly form, these new works interpolate the beholder. They embody, in many ways, the Lacanian formula of fantasy: $ ◊ a. A barred subject ($), split eternally from itself, relates to the unattainable cause of its desire, the objet petit a (a), through the matheme of relationality and desire, the punch or cut of Christ’s wound, the diamond (◊). In Pang’s work, these three elements of fantasy collapse onto each other. The viewing subject is physically barred from the object of its fantasy, the gaze of another, only able to access it as fragments through the diamond-shaped frame. The effect is visceral, akin to that of 19th-century barrier-grid animation, in which images are cut into strips and interleaved such that they reach the viewer’s eyes distorted, screened, parallax. Yet the brain puts the image back together. This is the trick, the illusion. To look is already to be trapped.

Matthew Pang lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include: Minus Life, Terminal Projects, London (2024); Terminal Transfer, Hot Wheels, Athens (2023); and Gallery Malmo, Edinburgh (2021).

Group exhibitions include: Making it Explicit, Graham Vunderink Gallery, New Lebanon, NY (2025); John is Sick, Borgenheim Rosenhoff, Paris (2024); Would you be worried if one of these Scottish people ceased to exist?, Charity, Glasgow (2024); Evil or Stupid, 3236RLS/Le Bourgeois, London (2024); and exhibitions at Marc Leblanc, Chicago (2024); Federico Vavassori, Milan (2022); Commercial Street, Los Angeles (2022); and Claude Balls Int, Marseille (2021).