Michael Matthews: Tragedy in our Commons-Gula, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 3 x (9 x A3).

At first glance, Michael Matthews’ Tragedy in our Commons-Gula presents as a frantic, almost illegible bestiary. Arranged in a strict three times nine-panel grid, the work immediately evokes the visual language of a forensic report or a taxonomic study gone wrong. Produced in 2024 South Africa, the work is deeply embedded in a national landscape defined by the depletion of public resources and the psychological exhaustion of its citizenry. The use of fragmented telephone directory pages collage as a substrate grounds the work in the immediate, disposable reality of the present, suggesting that the drama unfolding is not mythical, but a daily headline.

The mood is one of high-frequency anxiety and entropic decay. The thick, gestural black lines are violent and hurried, mimicking the speed of a predator’s strike or a scavenger’s panic. There is a palpable sense of claustrophobia within each A3 frame; the animals are not merely depicted but are entangled, overlapping in a way that suggests a lack of space and a surplus of aggression. The splatters of white and black paint act as visual noise, further heightening the sense of a chaotic struggle where the boundaries between individual entities have begun to dissolve.

The work operates within the critical framework of the Tragedy of the Commons, an economic theory where individuals, acting in their own self-interest, deplete a shared resource. Matthews appends Gula, the Latin root for gluttony, to this title, narrowing his critique to the voracious, insatiable appetite of contemporary power structures. In the South African context, this points directly to the systemic ‘state capture’ and corruption that has hollowed out the nation’s infrastructure. The repetition across nine panels suggests that this gluttony is not an isolated event but a cyclical, systemic pathology.

Matthews employs a cast of archetypal animals to map out a hierarchy of greed. The shark represents predatory capital; the elephant, often a symbol of the state or memory, appears here as a massive, lumbering entity being picked apart. The beetles and mice represent the smaller, parasitic actors who thrive in the shadow of larger collapses. The most significant metaphor, however, is the collage itself. By painting over the fragmented telephone directory pages, Matthews suggests that the ‘commons’ of public discourse and information is being obscured and stained by the very actors it seeks to document. The news is no longer a record; it is merely the dirt under the claws of the gluttonous.

There is a distinct tension between the historical and the immediate. The neo-expressionist style recalls the resistance art of 1980s South Africa, yet the 2024 date forces us to acknowledge that the "tragedy" has evolved rather than ended. The newsprint provides a literal temporal layer, capturing a specific moment in time, while the acrylic ink represents the permanent, indelible stain of greed that persists long after the daily news has been discarded.

The power of this work lies in its refusal to be polite. It captures the ‘stain’ of greed with a visceral, unpolished honesty. It is special because it functions as a map of a society eating itself; it transforms the act of viewing into an act of witnessing a feeding frenzy. The way the animal forms seem to emerge from and then devour the text beneath them is a chillingly accurate metaphor for the current state of global and local politics.

“A frantic, ink-stained ledger of a nation’s insatiable appetite.”

Michael Matthews: Tragedy in our Commons: Hubris, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 3 x (9 x A3).

Michael Matthews' Tragedy in our Commons: Hubris presents as a frantic, palimpsestic interrogation of order and entropy. The work is composed of a three times nine-panel grid of A3 sheets, repurposing the discarded skin of the analogue era: directory pages. In the context of 2024 South Africa, a nation grappling with the thirty-year anniversary of its democracy amidst crumbling infrastructure, systemic corruption, and the literal darkening of its commons through energy crises, this choice of substrate is deeply loaded. The directory is a relic of a collective identity, a list of names and services that once suggested a functional social contract. Matthews overwrites this record with a chaotic lexicon of acrylic splatters, gestural black linework, and collaged circular interventions.

The mood is one of high-frequency anxiety. There is a claustrophobic density to the mark-making that suggests a system under terminal stress. The red and green dots flicker like malfunctioning traffic signals or volatile stock market tickers, while the aggressive black strokes feel like a visual scream against the bureaucratic silence of the underlying text. It captures the specific affective state of contemporary South African life: the feeling of being caught within a grid that no longer supports the weight of the population it purports to catalogue.

The title explicitly invokes the economic theory of the Tragedy of the Commons, the idea that individuals, acting in their own self-interest, eventually deplete shared resources. By adding Hubris as a subtitle, Matthews points the finger at the arrogance of mismanagement. The work functions as a critique of the neoliberal failure to maintain the public sphere. The grid, a classic modernist trope of rationality and control, is here used to contain a mess that it can no longer manage. The concept is sound, though it risks being overshadowed by the sheer visual noise of the execution, which at times leans toward a familiar neo-expressionist aesthetic.

The directory pages serve as a metaphor for the body politic, a dense, unread mass of citizens reduced to fine print. The black lines act as ‘noise,’ the corruption or systemic interference that obscures the individual names. The yellow circular collages, often featuring snippets of advertisements or instructional text, function as spotlights or perhaps as coins, representing the commercial interests that frequently take precedence over the public good. The repetition of these circles across the panels suggests a cyclical, inescapable pattern of behaviour.

There is a fascinating temporal tension here. The paper belongs to a pre-digital past, a time when the ‘commons’ was a physical book on a kitchen counter. The acrylic interventions are the ‘now’. They are fast, messy, and urgent. By layering 2024's frustrations over an older medium, Matthews suggests that the current crisis is not a new phenomenon but an accumulation of historical neglect. The work documents the slow-motion collapse of a social structure, where the ink of the present is literally bleeding into the records of the past.

The strength of this piece lies in its materiality. In an age of digital art and clean conceptualism, Matthews’ insistence on the tactile, the stained, and the discarded feels radical. It forces the viewer to look at the ‘fine print’ of society. It is a physical manifestation of the mental load carried by those living in a state of perpetual ‘fix-it’ culture. It transforms the mundane directory into a site of archaeological mourning for a functional society.

“Matthews maps the static of a failing state, proving that when the social contract is torn, the only thing left to read is the wreckage.”

Michael Matthews: Tragedy in our Commons: IRA, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 3 x (9 x A3).

Upon first encounter, Michael Matthews’ Tragedy in our Commons: IRA presents itself as a frantic, staccato burst of violence organised within the rigid discipline of a three times 3x3 grid. The work, emerging from the South African context in 2024, immediately invokes a sense of chronic instability. South Africa, thirty years into its democracy, remains a landscape defined by the ghosts of systemic trauma and the pressing weight of contemporary social fragmentation. The scale suggests a portable, perhaps even hurried, documentation of a crisis. It feels less like a singular painting and more like a forensic contact sheet from a crime scene that is still actively being processed.

The mood is one of visceral agitation. There is no quietude here; the work screams through a palette of haematological reds and abrasive black ink. The washes of pink and crimson create an atmospheric ‘blood mist’ that hangs over the entire composition, while the aggressive, splattered black marks function as ocular shocks. There is a sense of frantic repetition, as if the artist is attempting to exorcise a recurring nightmare. The affective resonance is one of claustrophobia, the grid, which usually implies order, here serves only to trap the chaos within nine times three distinct, yet identical, chambers of suffering.

The title, Tragedy in our Commons, directs us toward a socio-political reading of shared resources and collective space. In economic theory, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ involves the depletion of shared resources through individual greed. Matthews seems to transpose this into a tragedy of shared humanity. The inclusion of ‘IRA’ in the title is a provocative, if somewhat cryptic, historical anchor. Whether referring to the Irish Republican Army as a symbol of protracted sectarian conflict, or perhaps a more localised South African acronym, it serves to link this specific visual violence to a broader lineage of paramilitary or revolutionary struggle. The Latin root: ira, meaning wrath or rage. This linguistic layer aligns perfectly with the raw, visceral execution of the piece. The work is not merely about a political entity; it is an embodiment of the effect of wrath itself. The splattered ink and the predatory, gnashing imagery are the visual manifestations of an ancient, uncontrollable anger that bubbles up when the commons, our shared social and physical resources, begin to fail. It is the wrath of the neglected and the fury of the system consuming itself.The work functions within a neo-expressionist framework, utilising the ‘ugly’ and the ‘unrefined’ to bypass intellectual distance and strike at a raw, nervous centre.

The imagery is a tangle of zoomorphic and humanoid distress. We see the recurring motif of a gaping, toothy maw, reminiscent of a shark or a crocodile, intertwined with flailing human limbs. This suggests a predatory relationship between the individual and a larger, more monstrous entity, perhaps the state, the corporation, or the mob. The black splatters act as metaphors for both physical gore and the ‘blacking out’ of history or memory. The repetition of the same scene across nine panels suggests that this tragedy is not an isolated event, but a systemic loop, a cycle of consumption and destruction that defines the ‘commons.’

Produced in 2024, this work sits at a precarious moment in South African history, characterised by crumbling infrastructure and heightened political anxiety. The temporal layering here is complex; while the medium and style evoke the raw resistance art of the 1980s, the 2024 date suggests that the "tragedy" has not ended but has merely mutated. The grid format introduces a cinematic temporality, yet because the panels do not show a progression, only a repetition, time is rendered static. It is a "forever now" of crisis, where the past (IRA) and the present (the South African commons) collide in a singular, bloody moment.

The strength of this work lies in its refusal to be decorative. In an era where much contemporary art is polished for the digital market, Matthews’ work is intentionally messy, tactile, and offensive to the eye. It captures the specific "noise" of the 2020s, a period defined by information overload and the breakdown of social contracts. The tension between the neat, white borders of the grid and the explosive, uncontrolled ink within them is a perfect metaphor for the thin veneer of order that masks a deeply turbulent reality. It is a work that feels as though it was made of necessity rather than vanity.

“A rhythmic autopsy of a collective failure, where the grid provides the only containment for a scream that refuses to end.”

Michael Matthews: Tragedy in Our Commons – Acedia, 2024, South Africa. Acrylic, collage on paper, 3 x (9 x A3).

Michael Matthews presents a formidable grid of twenty-seven A3 panels, organised into three distinct chromatic zones: acidic green, electric blue, and a pale, fleshy pink. At first glance, the work functions as a rhythmic, almost decorative frieze, but closer inspection reveals a dense layering of acrylic paint over collaged newsprint and classified advertisements. Produced in South Africa in 2024, the work emerges from a landscape defined by profound socio-political fatigue. Thirty years after the dawn of democracy, the nation grapples with the fallout of state capture, failing infrastructure, and extreme economic disparity. The title, Tragedy in Our Commons: Acedia, immediately grounds the work in both economic theory and medieval theology. The Tragedy of the Commons refers to the depletion of shared resources through individual greed, while Acedia denotes a spiritual sloth or a listless indifference to one’s condition. This is art for a period of stagnation.

The mood is one of frantic stasis. Despite the high-key colour palette, there is a palpable sense of exhaustion. The repetition of animal silhouettes (bulls, elephants, and lizards) across the grid suggests a conveyor belt of ghosts. The green section feels toxic rather than pastoral; the blue is clinical and detached; the pink is reminiscent of raw meat or sun-damaged skin. There is a nervous energy in the gestural outlines of the animals, yet they are trapped within their respective panels, unable to break the grid. It captures the specific affective state of 2024: a world saturated with information and crisis, yet seemingly incapable of meaningful movement.

Matthews employs the grid as a tool of containment and categorisation, a nod to the bureaucratic structures that manage (or mismanage) the commons. By using newsprint as the substrate, he literally builds his imagery upon the discarded noise of capital and commerce. The classified ads represent the ultimate commodification of daily life: everything is for sale, from vacuum cleaners to security services. The critical framework here is the intersection of ecological collapse and psychological apathy. Acedia is not merely laziness; it is a refusal to care about the world. By titling the work after this specific vice, Matthews suggests that the tragedy of our shared resources is not just a failure of policy, but a failure of the spirit. The work asks whether we have become so desensitized by the constant churn of information that we can no longer feel the weight of the losses we are witnessing.

The animals serve as potent, if somewhat traditional, metaphors for the natural world and national identity. The bull or cow in the green section evokes land, wealth, and traditional African heritage, yet here it is fragmented and overlaid with text, suggesting the erosion of these values by market forces. The elephant in the blue section, typically a symbol of memory and majesty, is rendered as a ghostly, hollowed-out shape, perhaps signifying the vanishing of the wild or the hollowness of institutional memory. The lizards or chameleons in the pink section represent adaptation and survival, but their repetition feels more like a mutation than a triumph. The collage itself is a metaphor for the messy, overlapping reality of the contemporary South African experience: a palimpsest of old news and new anxieties.

There is a complex layering of time within these panels. The newsprint represents the immediate past, the ephemeral day-to-day concerns of the marketplace. The acrylic paint, applied with varying degrees of opacity, acts as a veil that both obscures and highlights certain fragments of text. The animal forms, reminiscent of ancient rock art or primal symbols, reach back into a deeper, ancestral time. By bringing these elements together in 2024, Matthews creates a sense of temporal collapse. The work suggests that the ancient (the animal) and the ephemeral (the news) are being crushed together in the vice of the present moment.

There is an unflinching engagement with the concept of Acedia. It is rare to see a contemporary artist tackle such a specific, theological vice and apply it so successfully to a modern socio-economic crisis. The work does not offer hope, nor does it shout in protest. Instead, it mirrors the very state it critiques, it is beautiful yet numbing, vibrant yet hollowed out. It captures the specific fatigue of living in a time where the commons are being dismantled while the populace watches in a state of colourful, distracted paralysis.

“Matthews maps the geography of our collective indifference, proving that the greatest tragedy is not that the world is ending, but that we are too bored to stop it.”