Matthew Stone on creating a sensory experience through technological complexity

The story behind his new edition – available now

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June 7, 2026 9:30am EDT

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Matthew Stone's approach to color makes digital space feel like nature.

'I want to be of the world and make something that doesn't feel like it's in that world. Where people can slow down and they can connect and they can have this moment of trust.' – Matthew Stone

For many, the last few years have stirred increasing anxiety around the role of AI in our lives and labors. For the artist Matthew Stone, technology is an opportunity for creative expansion rather than an existential threat.

You’d expect nothing less from this most digital of digital natives. Stone emerged from the vibrant South London underground of the mid-2000s, where warehouse parties, fashion, performance art, and club culture all bled into each other.

In conversation, Stone is provocative, intellectually adroit. On canvas, his work feels Baroque but futuristic. His layered colors manage to make digital space feel like nature.

We spoke to Stone about his new Artspace edition and his wider practice.

How would you describe what you do?

I construct paintings in 3D modelling software. I have a big archive of images of my own brush strokes, and I use them to texture virtual 3D models. A lot of that work is figurative. I have this motif of entangled bodies that comes from Western religious art. And I also move towards more abstract images that focus on the movement of the brush strokes and the ways that that sense of movement can evoke the same energy or passion of these bodies that are interacting physically with each other. It's as much dance as it is Titian's brawls.

How did this approach take shape?

In 2014, I had a strong feeling about the pending nature of digital life. And I'd set myself this task of finding a way to paint that was of my time, that wasn't just looking backwards – where I wasn't just effectively cycling to my studio on a penny farthing.

It's important to think about why one would make an oil painting in 2026. I took very literally the idea that they share at art school, which is that you can't just repeat what's been done. You've got to build on, or find ways to interact with, art history and the work that's been done by artists who have come before. So I thought I can’t just go to Florence and get classically trained and copy Caravaggio.

How does the lightbulb moment manifest itself when painting on a screen? Is there a parallel to the physicality of fighting or dancing with the canvas?
In my experience, there's as much room for mistakes and infinite variables that become exponentially more complex as you add more potential variables into the mix.

The first printed paintings that I made, I was photographing individual brush strokes and then stacking them in Photoshop. I was able to edit the brush strokes so they could swoop through each other in ways that wouldn't be possible. But it was very much a stacked Photoshop 2.5D, implied depth thing. But I knew I needed to use 3D software to make some of these individual brush strokes undulate, rather than just sort of float above each other.

It’s more like collage than mixing paint. Essentially a lot of it is cutting things out and putting them together.

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