Malik Roberts(b. 1990 Brooklyn, New York) is a Brooklyn based painter of fine art and an adroit practitioner of multimedia arts annexing the image plane and the conventions of figuration for an explicit endeavor in distilling, with the force and clarity of revelation, an essence of fibrous multiplicity that characterizes the being and becoming of black culture, as well as the virtualities and dregs of human nature. Compositions cohere as cinematic crescendos of perspectival and relational elements seemingly disparate in appearance but subordinate to the same whole in a prismatic synthesis capturing an intensity and verve of subject and theme reminiscent of predecessors within the vast Cubist tradition. In an age where the image plane bows obsequious to forces of deluded self-creation, rapacious opprobrium, and the techno-hypnosis emitted on the passive screens of hypermodernity, Roberts constructs a robust “way of seeing” the Other that is explicitly metaphysical and unapologetically witnesses the particular — the idiosyncratic.
His paintings express a visual vernacular that is rhizomatic in nature, spurning the constraints of the revealed naturalism typical of contemporary figuration for a type of concealment of geometric articulation exuding nuance, depth, and pure essence — the recorded hand conjures a form best elucidated as a Cubo-Prismism. This rhizomatic nature allows for “witnessing” — of context, of the interpersonal, and of (the)time(s). As a consequence, it allows for, as well, “reflection” — the uniting of an inner world with an outer world.
The criterion from which the aesthetic language explicated on his canvases and embodied in his everyday life is polyphyletic in its make up, emerging from a rich tapestry of experience comprising exposure to various disciplines and outlets of creative expression, countenance with a polyvocal creed, and the task of integrating such within the ever evolving, floating “context” of American cultural life. Growing up inundated with the persecutory caricatures and specter conjuring of American multicultural and racial tensions — in Atlanta by way of Brooklyn or Brooklyn by way of Atlanta — Roberts found transcendence and reconciliation in the world and character building of cinema, claiming as his utility the vector for which the actor serves as extension — the director — to conduct and refract a thematic exposition of the natures as demonstrated by various archetypical expressions Roberts has witnessed recurring throughout his cultural experience.
