At GMR.2, the exhibition Ship of Fools by Maltese artist Matthew Attard will be on view from
03/30/2023 to 05/05/2023.
The solo exhibition deals with the theme of Ship of Fools through unpublished and released works
by the artist. The allegory depicted is a leitmotiv used to express one of the main themes: man's
complete reliance on technology. In the past, in fact, Attard has made stone drawings of the Ship
of Fools through the use of the eye-tracker: a technological tool that follows the human gaze,
marks dots, and, through post-production, processes a drawing 'in the dark' that the artist cannot
control.
Dedication to drawing is one of the foundations of Matthew Attard's artistic production, who
researches different methods of drawing that have the characteristic of never ending. An open
ending that triggers important questions in the viewer and gives him the task of concluding the
story by giving his own interpretation.
The unpublished works, in fact, created in conjunction with the solo exhibition, see the use of a
peculiar palette, different from the usual palette painters are used to. Modifying editing programs,
he replaced conventional tools, such as brushes, with emoticons.
Used to reproduce the Ship of Fools, emoji identify a contemporary iconographic language that
has become global but at the same time limiting in that it is incapable of expressing human
emotions with totality. At the same time, it renders the idea of the ship as a metaphor for
government led without rationale by a group of fools.
Revisiting the traditional iconographies of the Ship of Fools through the use of emoji as a drawing
method was thus an intersection of historical, cultural, contemporary, ironic and satirical
concepts.