By harnessing the online meme culture towards a heterotopia realm, Matei widens the boundaries between the virtual and the real, the uncanny and the familiar, the accident and the poetic, that have come to define the contemporary mindset.
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Nowadays, online images and visual (mis)representations of things are supernaturally present, revealing reality as meaningless, as production of non-sense and abstract ideas, a phenomenon that deeply interests the artist. Matei possesses a large archive of abstract images found on the internet, a growing archive with dissonant, often poor-quality imagery that he recomposes in different contexts and artworks. The spoken slang is now transformed into visual slang, language and images complement each other in everydayness, hovering over a form of abstract humour.
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Whereas Matei calls it zombie scrolling, Hito Steyerl says cell phones are zombie cameras, cameras that failed to die. As such, the ongoing, 24/7 circulation of images, anonymous images, borderless images has long permeated the artist’s practice.
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Just as there are no borders for the circulation of online images, neither are there for our gazes. Examining contemporary definitions of image production and circulation, Matei’s presentation invites us to navigate an environment that interrogates accessibility and inclusion, while musing on ideas of value and spectatorship.
[Text by Cristina Vasilescu (curator) originally written for Matei Dumitriu’s solo exhibition LUZ (2024, Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest)]