Brooklyn-based painter and multimedia artist Malik Roberts creates deconstructed portraits with controversial contemporary subjects, which explore the relationship between visual culture and reality today. His paintings rely on images and conventions recognizable from the media, reframing his appropriated source material to reveal the absurdity of everyday life.
Inspired by Caravaggio, but also Picasso’s Blue Period, Francis Bacon and a little bit of George Condo, his paintings remind us of a shattered mirror, but one that reveals a hidden truth in its fracture. While his visual language combines influences of modern and pop art, Roberts’ sophisticated compositions provoke engagement rather than astonishment, inviting the viewer to consider the impact of visual media on the consumption of ideas in the Digital Age.
“I feel like it’s a good time to be alive and be an artist in this world,” admitted Roberts in an interview with Paper Magazine. “Especially as a young Black artist — a news piece came out recently about Wall Street buying up Black art. There are a lot more opportunities being created now for Black artists to thrive in. People are really looking to Black art across all type of mediums… I now have friends who are artists, so it’s kinda cool to go to their shows and their galleries and then they come to my galleries. We all support each other, and that’s a good feeling. That said, I am lucky enough to have been given opportunities, but I haven’t taken them for granted, and I’ve killed it. I have. It’s about working smart.”
“I am taking my work very seriously, I want my work to be as serious as I am,” he adds. “But for some reason my work ends up always being serious. My last show was about cultural appropriation, so this one is just another important topic of conversation. That’s why I even changed the color palette, even though I loved the palette, I thought it was too bubblegum. I wanted to pull it back a little bit. I wanted to challenge myself.”
Take a look at some of his striking paintings in the gallery below.
