Michael Matthews: The Shape of War - ANAK, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 9 x A3

The Shape of War - ANAK by Michael Matthews presents as a frantic, serialised confrontation with the machinery of conflict. Composed of nine A3 panels arranged in a grid, the work immediately invokes the legacy of Pop Art’s repetition, yet it eschews Warholian glamour for a gritty, Neo-Expressionist violence. Produced in 2024 South Africa, the work arrives at a moment when the nation is navigating complex internal security challenges while the global landscape is increasingly defined by televised and digital warfare. The repetition of the soldier’s silhouette suggests a manufacturing of violence, a recurring nightmare that refuses to be resolved.

The mood is one of sustained agitation. The palette, dominated by visceral ochres, dried-blood maroons, and startling flashes of hazard-orange, creates an atmosphere of emergency. There is no negative space that feels safe; every inch of the paper is colonised by splatters, drips, and collage. The affective resonance is that of a sensory overload, mimicking the chaotic fog of war where the individual is submerged in a cacophony of mud, fire, and information. It feels less like a finished painting and more like a series of field reports salvaged from a disaster zone.

Matthews utilises the grid to deconstruct the archetype of the combatant. By repeating the same stencilled figure, the artist highlights the dehumanisation inherent in military structures. The soldier is no longer a person but a shape, a repeatable, disposable unit of geopolitical currency. The title ANAK, which can refer to the biblical giants (the Anakim) or serve as a linguistic marker in various cultures, suggests a scale of conflict that is larger than life, perhaps even mythic. Also, a graphic novel and cartoon book way of expressing a sound. Critically, the work sits at the intersection of information and violence; the use of collage suggests that war is something we consume through the fractured lens of media and print.

The primary symbol is the rifle-bearing silhouette, which functions as a universal signifier for state-sanctioned force. However, the most compelling metaphors are found in the white diagonal slashes that cut across several panels. These could be interpreted as searchlights, censorship bars, or perhaps the blinding light of an explosion. They provide a structural counterpoint to the organic messiness of the splatters. The telephone book collage underneath the paint acts as a metaphor for the erasure of history; the specificities of the news are buried under the broad, messy strokes of the "shape" of war, suggesting that while the headlines change, the violence remains structurally identical.

The work is deeply rooted in the present of 2024, yet it feels haunted by the 20th century. In South Africa, the image of the soldier is inextricably linked to the militarisation of the apartheid state, yet Matthews’ treatment feels contemporary, referencing the messy, asymmetrical warfare of the 21st century. There is a temporal tension between the slow process of collage and the fast, impulsive nature of the splatters. This layering suggests that while war is planned with bureaucratic precision (the grid), its execution is a matter of chaotic, immediate destruction (the paint).

The power of this work lies in its cumulative weight. A single panel might be dismissed as a study, but the nine-panel grid demands a different kind of attention. It forces the viewer to acknowledge the "industry" of war. The tactile quality of the acrylic and collage gives the work a physical presence that digital images of war lack. It is a reminder that conflict is messy, sticky, and physical. In an era of "clean" drone warfare and digital propaganda, Matthews insists on the dirty, manual reality of the shape of war.

"Matthews captures the terrifying geometry of the infinite soldier, where the individual is erased by the very silhouette they are forced to inhabit."

Michael Matthews: The Shape of War - BOOM, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 9 x A3

Upon encountering Michael Matthews’ The Shape of War - BOOM, one is immediately struck by the aggressive modularity of the 3x3 grid. The work presents a relentless repetition of a singular, militarized silhouette—a soldier in a state of perpetual readiness or engagement. Produced in South Africa in 2024, the piece arrives at a complex juncture. While the nation sits thirty years into its democratic project, the specter of militarisation remains a potent historical and contemporary ghost. Matthews utilizes the A3 format not as a singular canvas, but as a series of cells, suggesting a taxonomy of violence that is both clinical in its arrangement and chaotic in its execution. The work sits firmly within the tradition of South African protest and post-protest art, echoing the visceral mark-making of figures like William Kentridge or Dumile Feni, yet it adopts a more fragmented, postmodern approach to the image.

The mood is one of controlled cacophony. There is a frantic, kinetic energy derived from the splattered acrylics, the BOOM of the title made visual. The palette is dominated by scorched ochres, muddy browns, and jarring streaks of arterial red, punctuated by the occasional cold clinical blue of what appears to be adhesive tape or specific collage elements. It feels claustrophobic despite the white space between the frames. There is no peace in this repetition; instead, there is the exhaustion of a loop. The affective resonance is one of trauma that refuses to resolve, a persistent ringing in the ears translated into a visual staccato.

Matthews engages with the concept of the soldier as a readymade icon. By repeating the same stance across nine panels, the artist deconstructs the individuality of the combatant, turning the human form into a mechanical component of a larger machine. This is a critique of the industrialization of conflict. The use of collage—specifically newsprint and printed matter visible beneath the layers of pigment—serves as a critical framework for how war is consumed as a media product. We do not see the war; we see the shape of the war as it is filtered through reportage and cultural memory. The work oscillates between the singular expressive act (the splatter) and the mechanical reproduction (the repeated outline), creating a tension between the human cost and the systemic indifference of military structures.

The soldier functions as a hollow vessel, an archetype of state-sanctioned force. The black outlines are heavy, almost like lead caskets containing the explosive colors within. The red splatters are the most literal metaphors, representing blood, heat, and the suddenness of the BOOM. However, the most compelling symbol is the grid itself. The grid is the ultimate tool of Western rationalism and cartography; by placing the chaos of war within these neat, rectangular boundaries, Matthews highlights the futility of trying to contain or rationalize the irrationality of combat. The blue tape acts as a metaphor for a botched repair, a temporary, fragile attempt to hold a fractured narrative together.

The work is deeply layered, both physically and temporally. The base layer of collage suggests the weight of history and the constant churn of the news cycle. In the South African context, this layering evokes the palimpsest of the landscape, a ground that has been fought over and redefined multiple times. The 2024 dating is crucial; it suggests that despite the passage of time, the shape of war remains fundamentally unchanged. The work looks backward at 20th-century conflicts while feeling intensely present, reflecting a global zeitgeist where the threat of large-scale kinetic warfare has returned to the forefront of the collective consciousness.

The Shape of War - BOOM succeeds because it captures the specific texture of modern anxiety. It is not a polite observation of conflict; it is a messy, loud, and repetitive confrontation. What makes it special is the way it utilizes the A3 scale to create a sense of the domesticity of violence, these are sizes we associate with office printers and standard documents, yet they contain scenes of absolute rupture. Matthews has managed to make the archival feel explosive. The work does not just depict a boom; it feels as though it is in the process of detonating.

"Matthews reminds us that war is not a singular event, but a recurring geometry of human failure."

Michael Matthews: The Shape of War - BWAK, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 9 x A3.

The initial encounter with Michael Matthews' The Shape of War - BWAK is one of rhythmic, almost mechanical aggression. Presented as a 3x3 grid of A3 sheets, the work immediately invokes the language of the archive or the contact sheet. We are looking at a taxonomy of the martial form. Set in 2024 South Africa, the work arrives at a time when the nation is navigating complex geopolitical alignments and a domestic history deeply scarred by militarization. The repetition of the soldier silhouette suggests a haunting persistence of the past in the present, a visual stutter that refuses to resolve.

There is a profound sense of claustrophobia within the grid. Despite the white borders separating the individual panels, the explosive application of acrylic splatters creates a continuous field of visual noise. The mood is frantic, echoing the sensory overload of a combat zone or the frantic disarray of a newsroom floor. The palette, dominated by dried-blood browns, ochres, and a jarring, synthetic blue, evokes a feeling of 'dirty' warfare, where the clinical precision of modern technology is constantly undermined by the visceral reality of mud and gore.

The work operates on the tension between the individual and the icon. By using a repetitive stencil-like figure, Matthews strips the soldier of agency and identity, transforming the human body into a mere vessel for the shape of war. Conceptually, the work sits within the lineage of Neo-Expressionism, but it is tempered by the structural rigidity of the grid. This suggests that while war is chaotic and messy (the splatters), it is also a highly organised, systemic enterprise (the grid). The title's suffix, BWAK, introduces an onomatopoeic or perhaps coded element that disrupts the somberness with a hint of the absurd or the mechanical, like the sound of a glitch in a broadcast.

The central symbol is the rifle, which serves as the only horizontal stabilizer in an otherwise vertical and chaotic composition. It is the tool that defines the man. The collage elements, fragments of newsprint and text, act as the literal and metaphorical 'paper trail' of conflict. These fragments suggest that war is as much a product of media and bureaucracy as it is of ballistics. The blue splatters are particularly curious; they do not represent biological fluids but perhaps signify the digital 'blue screen' of modern remote warfare or the UN peacekeeper's presence, adding a layer of failed intervention to the scene.

Produced in 2024, the work is chronologically positioned far from the height of the South African Border War, yet it feels deeply informed by that era's aesthetic of resistance art. However, Matthews updates this by acknowledging the modular nature of contemporary life. The 9 x A3 format suggests a work that can be easily disassembled, transported, or reproduced—a nomadic monument to a permanent state of global unrest. It captures a moment where the history of violence in the Global South is being re-examined through the lens of current international crises.

The strength of this piece lies in its scale and its refusal to offer a focal point. By forcing the eye to jump from one A3 panel to the next, Matthews mimics the way we consume modern tragedy of fragments, through screens, and a state of perpetual distraction. The physical labor involved in the layering of acrylic and collage gives the work a haptic quality that digital representations of war lack. It is a gritty, physical reminder of the enduring "shape" of human conflict in an increasingly digitized world.

"Matthews presents war not as an event, but as a repetitive, atmospheric condition that stains the very paper we use to record it."

Michael Matthews: The Shape of War - DEAD, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 9 x A3.

The Shape of War - DEAD by Michael Matthews presents a jarring, serialised encounter with the iconography of conflict. Arranged in a three-by-three grid of A3 panels, the work immediately evokes the repetitive, assembly-line nature of modern warfare. Produced in South Africa in 2024, the piece arrives at a time when the nation continues to grapple with the ghosts of its militarised past while navigating a global landscape defined by distant yet hyper-visible atrocities. Matthews utilises a stencil-like black contour of a soldier, a universal cipher for state-sanctioned violence, and subjects it to a frantic, painterly decomposition.

There is a disturbing dissonance in the palette. The use of vibrant purples, bruised magentas, and flashes of ochre creates a mood that is less about the somber reality of death and more about the psychedelic trauma of the event. The atmosphere is claustrophobic; the soldier is trapped not only within the frame of the paper but within the thick, uncompromising black outlines of his own silhouette. The repetitive nature of the grid induces a sense of fatigue, mirroring the desensitization that occurs when images of war are consumed as daily media fodder.

Matthews operates within the tradition of the readymade silhouette, reminiscent of the pop-art repetitions of Andy Warhol, yet he strips away the celebrity glamour to reveal the anonymity of the infantryman. The critical framework here is the erasure of the individual. By repeating the same posture across nine frames, the artist highlights how the military apparatus flattens human identity into a repeatable, expendable unit. The work challenges the viewer to find the human within the mess, yet the paint seems to be winning the battle against the form.

The heavy black outline serves as a metaphor for the rigid structures of ideology and command. Inside these borders, however, the medium of acrylic and collage suggests a chaotic internal state or perhaps the physical disintegration of the body. The splatters of gold and ochre are particularly loaded; they suggest both the 'preciousness' of the sacrifice and the visceral reality of bodily fluids. The collage elements, partially obscured, act as the 'noise' of history: the maps, orders, and documents that precede the actual violence but are eventually drowned out by the mess of the conflict itself.

In the context of 2024 South Africa, this work resonates with a specific temporal weight. Decades after the end of the Border War, the figure of the soldier remains a contested site of memory. By presenting this work now, Matthews suggests that the "shape" of war is a persistent, underlying geometry in the South African psyche. The work feels contemporary in its 'glitch' aesthetic, the way the paint overflows the lines suggests a digital or systemic failure, a breakdown of the very order that the soldier is meant to uphold.

The work is most successful in its refusal to be 'neat.' The visceral application of paint prevents the grid from becoming merely decorative. However, one might argue that the use of pink and purple hues is a somewhat familiar contemporary trope used to signal irony or subversion, which at times risks softening the blow of the title. The collage elements are tantalisingly present but perhaps too buried to provide a specific historical anchor. If the intention is to discuss the 'DEAD' as the title suggests, the work succeeds in showing the body as a site of decomposition, but it occasionally flirts with a graphic aesthetic that threatens to prioritize style over the gravity of its subject matter.

What distinguishes this piece is the tension between the static and the fluid. While the soldier’s stance never changes, frozen in a permanent state of readiness or rigor mortis, the internal landscape of each panel is unique. This creates a powerful paradox: the external 'shape' of war is monotonous and unchanging, yet the internal cost, the 'mess' of it, is infinitely varied and chaotic. It captures the moment a human being is emptied of their personhood and filled with the turbulent debris of history.

"A haunting taxonomy of the anonymous, where the individual is sacrificed to the persistence of the pattern."

Michael Matthews: The Shape of War - EVIL, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 9 x A3.

The Shape of War - EVIL presents itself as a relentless, rhythmic interrogation of militarism. Arranged in a disciplined three-by-three grid, the work immediately evokes the seriality of Pop Art, yet it replaces the glamour of consumerism with the grit of conflict. Produced in 2024 in South Africa, a nation whose modern identity is inextricably linked to a history of state-sanctioned violence and paramilitary struggle, the work functions as a contemporary haunting. It suggests that despite the passage of time, the ghost of the combatant remains a permanent fixture in the collective psyche.

The mood is one of stagnant anxiety. The dominant palette of ochre, rust, and burnt orange creates a visceral heat, reminiscent of both the South African landscape and the dried patina of old blood. There is a frantic energy in the splatters that contrast sharply with the rigid, heavy black outlines of the soldiers. This creates a psychological tension between the order of the military formation and the chaotic, messy reality of the violence it enacts. The repetition does not offer comfort; instead, it creates a sense of entrapment, suggesting a cycle of aggression that cannot be broken.

Matthews utilises the grid to create a taxonomy of the anonymous. By repeating the same silhouette, the artist strips the soldier of individuality, transforming the human being into a mere unit of 'evil.' However, the conceptual framework is somewhat endangered by the title itself. Labelling the work EVIL is a bold, perhaps overly didactic move. In contemporary discourse, such moral binaries are often viewed with scepticism. The work is more successful when viewed through the lens of the banality of evil, the idea that destruction becomes a repetitive, administrative task, as suggested by the uniform A3 segments and the mechanical reproduction of the figure.

The silhouette is the central metaphor: a hollow vessel for ideology. The soldier is not a man but a shape, a 'Shape of War.' The collage elements visible beneath the acrylic layers act as the 'guts' of the machine, representing the paperwork, news cycles, and bureaucratic mandates that fuel the frontline. The splatters, or tachism-style marks, serve as indexical traces of the collateral damage that refuses to stay within the lines of the strategic plan. The weapon is rendered not as an external tool, but as a fused part of the soldier’s anatomy, suggesting a post-human evolution toward pure lethality.

There is a striking dissonance between the 2024 production date and the visual language of the work, which draws heavily from the resistance art and protest aesthetics of the 1980s. This temporal layering suggests that the "shape" of war has not evolved. While the technology of 2024 might involve drones and algorithms, Matthews insists on the primal, physical presence of the boots-on-the-ground combatant. It is a reminder that in the Global South, the experience of conflict often remains tactile, dusty, and manual.

The significance of this piece lies in its refusal to look away from the physical stain of war. In an era where conflict is often consumed through clean, backlit screens, Matthews forces a confrontation with the 'dirty' medium of acrylic and collage. The scale gives it the feeling of a disassembled manifesto or a wall of wheat-pasted posters, reclaiming the urgency of street-level political engagement. It is an artifact of persistent memory in a world prone to historical amnesia.

"A brutalist meditation on the ergonomics of destruction."

Michael Matthews: The Shape of War - FEAR, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 9 x A3.

Michael Matthews presents a 3x3 grid of nine A3 panels titled The Shape of War - FEAR. At first glance, the work operates within the tradition of seriality, reminiscent of the Pop Art movement’s fascination with repetition, yet it swaps the consumerist icon for a far more harrowing subject: the anonymous soldier. Produced in 2024 South Africa, the work arrives at a time when the nation remains deeply scarred by its militarised past while navigating a global landscape defined by escalating geopolitical conflicts. The use of a grid suggests a desire for order or perhaps an archival impulse, yet the internal chaos of each panel immediately subverts any sense of stability.

The mood is one of frantic stasis. There is a palpable vibration between the static, heavy black outlines of the infantryman and the volatile, splattered textures that occupy the interior and exterior of the figures. The dominant ochre and orange palette evokes the dust of the South African veld, a site of historical conflict, while the deep red-brown splatters function as a visceral shorthand for violence and bodily trauma. The repetition does not dilute the impact; rather, it creates a claustrophobic rhythm, suggesting that the fear mentioned in the title is not a singular event but a persistent, echoing condition.

Matthews utilises the soldier as a semiotic vessel. By stripping away individual features and reducing the figure to a thick, crude outline, he addresses the dehumanization inherent in military structures. The work can be viewed through the lens of biopolitics, the way the state manages and utilizes bodies as instruments of power. By titling the piece FEAR, the artist shifts the focus from the tactical reality of war to its psychological residue. The critical framework here is the intersection of memory and media; the soldier is not a person but a shape filled with the debris of information.

The collage elements serve as the primary metaphorical engine of the work. Fragments of newsprint, maps, and technical text peek through the acrylic, suggesting that the soldier’s identity is constructed from propaganda, geography, and bureaucracy. The rifle, rendered in the same thick black line as the body, becomes an anatomical extension of the man, suggesting a permanent state of readiness that precludes peace. The orange acrylic acts as a cauterising agent, attempting to hold the fragmented collage together, yet the splatters indicate a leak, a failure of the container to hold the trauma within.

The work exists in a state of temporal collapse. The silhouette of the soldier recalls the iconography of the South African Border War (1966–1989), a period that continues to haunt the national psyche. However, the 2024 date and the frantic, street-art-adjacent application of medium anchor it firmly in the present. It reflects a contemporary world where war is consumed in bite-sized, repetitive digital feeds. The use of paper and analogue collage in a digital age feels like an act of forensic recovery, trying to find the human weight in an era of drone strikes and remote warfare.

While the work is visually arresting and technically cohesive, it flirts with certain clichés of the genre. The use of red-brown splatters to signify blood or violence is a well-worn trope in neo-expressionist political art and risks becoming a shorthand that bypasses deeper intellectual engagement. Furthermore, the soldier silhouette is an exhausted motif in contemporary art history. However, Matthews succeeds in the way he handles the surface tension. The deliberate crudeness of the line work prevents the piece from becoming too polished or decorative. The failure of the outlines to perfectly contain the collage and paint reflects the unresolved tensions of the subject matter itself. The work is at its strongest when the collage elements are most legible, forcing the viewer to reconcile the 'acts' of the media with the 'feeling' of the paint.

The power of this work lies in its relentless rhythm. By presenting nine versions of the same 'fear,' Matthews illustrates the exhausting nature of hyper-vigilance. It is not a depiction of a battle, but a depiction of a state of being. The scale demands a physical movement from the viewer, a scanning of the grid that mimics the way a soldier or a civilian might scan a horizon for threats. It captures the specific South African anxiety of living in a society where the ghost of the military-industrial complex never truly left the room.

"Matthews has created a haunting taxonomy of the modern infantryman, proving that in the theatre of war, the most enduring shape is the one carved by terror."

Michael Matthews: The Shape of War - FWAK, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 9 x A3.

The work presents itself as a 3x3 grid of nine A3 panels, creating a modular monument to the infantryman. Michael Matthews utilizes a repetitive, stencil-like silhouette of a soldier in a mid-century combat stance, clutching a rifle. The immediate visual language is one of camouflage and chaos, heavily influenced by the aesthetics of street art and neo-expressionism. Set in 2024 South Africa, a nation with a deeply scarred history of domestic militarisation and a current, vocal role in global geopolitical conflicts, the work arrives at a moment where the image of the soldier is both a historical ghost and a contemporary headline. The use of the grid suggests a desire for order that is systematically undermined by the frantic application of paint. 

There is a palpable sense of noise in this work. The title, FWAK, functions as an onomatopoeic rupture, the sound of a bullet hitting a target, a muffled explosion, or perhaps a frustrated expletive. The mood is one of claustrophobic repetition. By repeating the same figure nine times, Matthews creates a sense of the infinite and the disposable. The splattered acrylic mimics the visceral mess of the battlefield, mud, blood, and debris, while the underlying collage adds a layer of bureaucratic or historical static. It does not feel heroic; it feels exhausting. 

The work operates within the framework of seriality, a tactic famously used by Andy Warhol to de-sensitise the viewer to images of violence or celebrity. Here, the soldier is treated as a commodity or a factory-stamped unit. The critical tension lies in the struggle between the individual and the archetype. By obscuring the soldier’s features with heavy black outlines and chaotic splatters, Matthews suggests that war is a process of erasure. The shape of war is not the shape of a man, but a recurring pattern of violence that consumes the individual. However, there is a risk here: the use of a generic soldier silhouette can sometimes veer into the territory of the cliché, bordering on the visual language of commercial protest art. The primary symbol is the camouflage palette of greens, ochres, and browns. In the South African context, these colors are loaded with the memory of the Border War and the uniforms of the apartheid-era South African Defence Force. By splattering these colors across the page, Matthews turns the logic of camouflage against itself. Instead of hiding the figure, the colors become the agent of its disintegration. The grid itself acts as a metaphor for the military’s attempt to categorize and control human life, while the erratic paint represents the entropic reality of actual combat. 

The work sits in a strange temporal middle ground. The silhouette feels like a relic from the mid-20th century, evoking the imagery of the World Wars or the Cold War. Yet, the execution, the frantic, messy application of acrylic and the 2024 date, places it firmly in the present. This suggests that the shape of war has not changed in a century; only our methods of documenting its messiness have evolved. The collage elements, if they contain contemporary text or media, act as a substrate of modern noise beneath an ancient, recurring violence. Matthews is successful in creating a work that feels physically heavy and urgent. The decision to use nine separate sheets of paper rather than one large canvas emphasises the fragmented nature of the subject. The FWAK title is punchy, with the strength of the work lying not in the silhouette itself, but in the moments where the paint almost completely swallows the figure, suggesting a total loss of humanity.

What distinguishes this piece is the tension between the rigid 3x3 structure and the total lack of discipline in the paint application. It captures the hypocrisy of military life: the outward appearance of strict discipline and uniform order versus the inward, visceral reality of terror and confusion. In the South African context of 2024, it serves as a reminder that the machinery of war is a persistent, repeating loop that refuses to be resolved or neatly filed away in the archives of history.

"A rhythmic, messy autopsy of the infantryman as a recurring ghost in the machinery of history."

Michael Matthews: The Shape of War - KILL, 2024, South Africa. 

The Shape of War - KILL presents itself as a frantic, serial interrogation of militarized violence. Composed of nine A3 panels arranged in a rigid 3x3 grid, Michael Matthews utilizes the language of repetition to echo the industrial scale of modern conflict. Emerging from South Africa in 2024, the work exists in a complex socio-political vacuum. While the country is decades removed from the state-mandated militarism of the apartheid era, it remains a society haunted by high levels of structural violence and a burgeoning private security industry that mirrors the silhouettes seen here. The work immediately evokes the pop-art seriality of Andy Warhol, yet replaces the glamour of celebrity with the grim, repetitive posture of a soldier in a terminal aim.

The mood is one of vibrating aggression. There is a palpable sense of noise in these images in a visual staccato that mimics the rhythmic firing of an automatic weapon. The choice of a high-key magenta and orange palette is jarring; it moves the subject matter away from the muted earth tones of traditional camouflage into the realm of the synthetic and the digital. This creates a sense of detachment, as if we are viewing thermal imaging or a glitching heads-up display. It is uncomfortable, frantic, and intentionally messy, suggesting that the act of killing is never a clean, singular event but a chaotic rupturing of space.

Matthews engages with the concept of the soldier as a readymade icon of destruction. By repeating the same basic posture across nine frames, the artist strips the individual of agency, transforming the human body into a functional tool; a weapon system. The title, KILL, is uncompromisingly literal, perhaps dangerously so. In a contemporary art landscape that often favours nuance and obfuscation, such a blunt title risks being seen as reductive. However, within the framework of 2024’s global geopolitical climate, where war is consumed as a series of repetitive digital clips, the work functions as a physical manifestation of that desensitisation. It asks whether the repetition of the image makes the act more or less horrific.

The central symbol is the silhouette of the rifleman, a shape that has become a universal shorthand for power and threat. The orange splatters act as metaphors for ballistics, blood, or perhaps the 'heat' of combat, yet their artificiality prevents a purely literal reading. The collage elements beneath the acrylic function as the "noise" of history, scraps of information and texture that the soldier’s form attempts to suppress or overwrite. The grid itself is a metaphor for the systemic nature of war; it is an organised, bureaucratic structure that contains and replicates the chaotic violence within each frame.

The work sits at a peculiar temporal crossroads. The gestural, expressionistic application of paint harks back to mid-century neo-expressionism, yet the subject matter is painfully current. In 2024, South Africa find itself navigating a world where the 'shape of war' has shifted toward drone strikes and proxy conflicts, yet the boots-on-the-ground soldier remains the ultimate symbol of territorial claim. There is a sense of "stuttering time," the nine panels do not show a progression or a narrative, but rather the same moment trapped in a loop, suggesting an inability to move past the primal impulse of the title.

While the work is visually arresting and technically energetic, it flirts with certain clichés of 'anti-war' art. The soldier-with-a-gun is a well-trodden path in South African art history, and Matthews must work hard to differentiate his voice from the heavy shadows cast by predecessors who dealt with similar themes during the Border War era. The use of magenta is a bold choice that saves the work from being a mere exercise in grit, but there are moments where the composition feels slightly unresolved, specifically in the lower-left and center-right panels where the black outlines lose their structural integrity. Furthermore, the lack of a stated intention leaves the work vulnerable to being read as a purely aestheticised version of violence, though the sheer kinetic energy of the paint suggests a deeper, perhaps more personal, frustration.

The power of this piece lies in its tactile defiance. In an era where images of war are increasingly mediated through smooth glass screens and sterile algorithms, Matthews insists on the messiness of the hand. The 9 x A3 scale creates a physical presence that demands space, forcing the viewer to confront the 'shape' of the soldier as a tangible, dirty, and vibrant entity. It captures the frantic pulse of a world that seems to be perpetually on the brink, using the grid not to provide order, but to highlight the futility of trying to contain such a volatile subject.

"Matthews presents a violent stutter in the visual record, proving that even in a digital age, the most terrifying shape remains the human one."

Michael Matthews: The Shape of War - LOVE, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 9 x A3.

The Shape of War - LOVE by Michael Matthews presents itself as a rhythmic, almost hypnotic interrogation of militarized identity. Arranged in a strict three-by-three grid, the work immediately invokes the seriality of Pop Art, yet it eschews the clean surfaces of Warhol for a frantic, Neo-Expressionist urgency. Produced in 2024 in South Africa, the work arrives at a moment when the nation continues to navigate the deep scars of its hyper-militarised past while confronting a global landscape increasingly defined by renewed territorial aggression. The repetition of the soldier figure suggests a factory-line production of violence, yet the color palette, dominated by violets, magentas, and golds, clashes violently with the grim subject matter.

There is a jarring dissonance at play here. The gestural black outlines of the soldier are aggressive and heavy, conveying a sense of weighted movement or a permanent state of readiness. However, this is submerged in a field of chromatic sweetness. The mood is not one of sombre mourning, but rather a chaotic, feverish hallucination. The splatters of gold and ochre feel like both precious metals and visceral stains, creating an affective state that oscillates between the celebratory and the macabre. It captures the anxiety of a contemporary South Africa where the spectre of the soldier remains a complicated symbol of both past trauma and current state authority.

The central tension of the work lies in its subtitle: LOVE. Matthews forces a confrontation between the machinery of war and the most profound of human emotions. Critically, this can be read as an examination of the seductive nature of nationalism, the way the state co-opts the language of love and duty to fuel the engine of conflict. By repeating the image nine times, the artist suggests that the individual soldier is erased, replaced by a repeatable, disposable icon. The work sits within a critical framework that questions the aestheticisation of violence. Is Matthews suggesting that war is being rebranded for a contemporary audience, or is he pointing to the inherent love of power that sustains global conflict?

The soldier is stripped of specific insignia, becoming a universal archetype of the combatant. This anonymity serves as a metaphor for the dehumanisation necessary for the conduct of war. The use of gold splatters is particularly potent; in a South African context, gold is never neutral. It represents the extractive history that built the nation and the economic incentives that often underpin military interventions. The purple and pink washes act as a metaphor for the bruising of the social fabric, or perhaps the cosmetic veneer of diplomacy that attempts to mask the underlying brutality of the state.

The work functions as a palimpsest. The underlying collage elements, though partially obscured, suggest a layering of history and information, perhaps newsprint or tactical maps, that have been drowned out by the singular, loud image of the gunman. There is a clear dialogue with the 1980s resistance art of South Africa, which often used grit and raw gesture to combat apartheid-era propaganda. However, by placing this in 2024, Matthews updates the conversation to reflect a world where images of war are consumed through the saturated, high-contrast filters of digital media.

While the work is visually arresting, it risks falling into a certain decorative trap. The repetition of the soldier, while conceptually grounded in the idea of mass production, occasionally feels like a formal crutch. The collage elements, which could provide a much-needed specificity or a 'punctum' of reality, are so heavily overpainted in some panels that their critical utility is diminished. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of war and love is a well-trodden path in contemporary art; for the work to truly succeed, it must move beyond the irony of the contrast. There is an unresolved tension between the beauty of the mark-making and the ugliness of the subject that occasionally feels more like a stylistic choice than a profound philosophical inquiry.

The power of this piece lies in its stubborn persistence. Despite the "pretty" colors, the black silhouette of the soldier refuses to be aestheticized into submission. It remains a jagged, uncomfortable presence in every frame. The scale demands a physical engagement from the viewer, forcing them to scan the grid and notice the slight, human variations in the splatters and lines. It is a work that captures the specific exhaustion of the 2024 zeitgeist: the feeling of being trapped in a loop of televised and digital conflict that is simultaneously horrifying and strangely vibrant.

"Matthews presents a haunting stencil of the human cost of ideology, where the machinery of death is dressed in the colours of a sunset."

Michael Matthews: The Shape of War - MINE, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 9 x A3.

Michael Matthews presents a 3x3 grid of serial repetitions titled The Shape of War - MINE. Produced in 2024 in South Africa, this work emerges from a nation with a deeply scarred military history, currently navigating its role as a vocal critic of global geopolitical violence. At first glance, the work mimics the pop-art sensibilities of Andy Warhol or the street-art urgency of Blek le Rat, yet it carries a weight that is distinctly local. The repetition of the soldier archetype suggests a factory-line production of conflict, where the 

The mood is one of frantic, neon-lit anxiety. The use of a vibrant, almost synthetic purple creates a stage that feels detached from the grit of a real battlefield, moving the subject into the realm of the digital or the televised. There is a sense of noise and interference created by the orange and light blue splatters. These gestural marks feel like "glitches" in the transmission of the image, suggesting that our perception of war is constantly being interrupted or coloured by external narratives.

Matthews utilises the framework of Seriality to deconstruct the myth of the soldier. By repeating the same crouched, aggressive stance nine times, the artist highlights the mechanical nature of modern warfare. The work functions as a critique of how conflict is packaged and consumed as a commodity. The title, MINE, functions as a potent double entendre. It refers simultaneously to the explosive hidden beneath the earth, a persistent threat in post-conflict zones, and to a possessive claim of the narrative. It asks the viewer to consider their own ownership of, or complicity in, the cycle of violence.

The soldier is rendered as a hollow silhouette, a black outline that contains fragments of collage. Upon closer inspection, these fragments appear to be maps, text, or technical drawings. This suggests that the combatant is not a person, but a composite of bureaucracy, geography, and orders—a literal "paper tiger." The rifle is the only constant, defining the figure's existence. The orange splatters serve as a metaphor for the messiness of human life (blood, fire, heat) protruding through the cold, calculated black lines of military strategy.

There is a tension between the historical and the contemporary here. The medium of collage on paper evokes the resistance art of 1980s South Africa, where artists used found materials to bypass censorship. However, the 2024 context and the high-saturation palette speak to the current era of 'info war' and the gamification of violence. Matthews bridges the gap between the physical reality of the foot soldier and the abstract way war is viewed through screens in the 21st century.

While the work is visually arresting and technically proficient, it flirts with a certain degree of iconographic banality. The 'soldier silhouette' is a well-worn trope in political art, and without the collage elements, the work might risk becoming merely decorative. The success of the piece relies heavily on the tension between the rigid grid and the chaotic splatters. Some panels feel less resolved than others; for instance, where the purple background becomes too uniform, the sense of depth is lost. However, the decision to present this as a 9-part series is correct, as the cumulative effect of the repetition is far more powerful than any single panel would be.

The brilliance of this work lies in its refusal to offer a clean moral stance. By titling it MINE, Matthews implicate the artist and the observer. It is not just "the" shape of war, but 'my' shape of war. It captures the way modern conflict feels both distant (serial, colourful, framed) and uncomfortably personal. It is a rare work that manages to look like a poster on a city wall while functioning like a psychological mirror.

"A rhythmic pulse of mechanised trauma, Michael Matthews reminds us that in the theatre of modern conflict, the individual is merely a recurring stain on a vibrant screen."

Michael Matthews: The Shape of War - RAGE, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 9 x A3.

The work by Michael Matthews, titled The Shape of War - RAGE, presents itself as a 3x3 grid of nine A3 panels. At first glance, the viewer is confronted with a repetitive, almost industrial insistence on a singular motif: the silhouette of a soldier in a state of combat readiness. Emerging from South Africa in 2024, this work cannot be divorced from that nation's traumatic history of state-sponsored militarism, nor can it ignore the escalating global conflicts that define the current decade. The use of a grid suggests a taxonomy of violence, a way of cataloguing the visceral mess of war within a rigid, rationalist framework.

The mood is one of controlled ferocity. The palette is dominated by an earthy, scorched ochre and a dark, coagulated crimson that unmistakably evokes dried blood. There is a heat to these images, a sense of a landscape, or a psyche, on fire. The repetition of the soldier figure does not lead to a sense of security; rather, it creates a claustrophobic effect. The viewer feels trapped in a loop of escalating aggression. The rage mentioned in the title is not expressed through a single scream, but through the relentless, staccato rhythm of the nine panels.

Matthews employs the soldier as a readymade icon, a stencil-like figure that stripped of individual features becomes a vessel for collective anxieties. By repeating the image, the artist engages with the concept of the dehumanized combatant, the soldier not as a person, but as a repeatable unit of force. The work sits within a lineage of neo-expressionist critique, echoing the raw, gestural language of artists like Leon Golub or the South African contemporary Robert Hodgins. The framework here is the commodification of conflict; war is presented as a repeatable, modular product that can be scaled up or down according to the demands of the state.

The silhouette is the central metaphor: a void where a human should be. By filling this void with collage, fragments of text, newsprint, and textured paper, Matthews suggests that the soldier is literally constructed from the discourse of war. They are made of headlines, propaganda, and bureaucratic orders. The splatters of paint act as an invasive element, breaking the boundaries of the black outlines. This represents the leakage of trauma; the idea that the violence contained within the soldier cannot be neatly cordoned off and inevitably spills over into the surrounding environment.

While the work is dated 2024, it feels unstuck in time. The soldier’s gear, the helmet and rifles, generic enough to evoke the World Wars, the South African Border War of the 1970s and 80s, or contemporary urban warfare. This temporal ambiguity is intentional. It suggests that while the names of the wars change, the shape of the rage remains constant. In the South African context, this work speaks to the persistence of a martial ghost that haunts a country still grappling with the legacies of its fortified past.

The work is visually arresting, yet it borders on the didactic. The use of the soldier silhouette is a well-worn trope in political art, and at times, the repetition feels like it might be masking a lack of formal evolution across the nine panels. One might argue that the variations between the frames are too subtle to justify the scale. However, the success of the piece lies in its tactile aggression. The way the acrylic is handled, thick, smeared, and violently applied, saves the work from becoming a mere graphic exercise. The tension between the neat grid and the filthy, textured interiors of the figures provides the necessary friction to keep the viewer engaged.

What distinguishes The Shape of War - RAGE is its refusal to offer a hero or a victim. It focuses entirely on the mechanism of the soldier. By presenting the figure as a shape to be filled with the detritus of society, Matthews captures the terrifying anonymity of modern conflict. The work functions as a mirror; we do not see a specific enemy, but rather the recurring pattern of our own collective failure to move past the aesthetics of force. It is a grim, necessary inventory of a world that remains addicted to its own destruction.

"A brutal taxonomy of the anonymous machine, where the individual is erased by the relentless ink of history."