Guitar player 2016

Babak-Matveev's 'Guitar Player' is a digital artwork – I can imagine it coming into being pixel by pixel, colour by colour. It’s a world of abundant bright colour, where someone sits playing guitar in a field of pink and purple flowers, a pastoral idyll where the flowers bloom forever. I feel like I’m looking into a dream. What was Babak-Matveev thinking when they made this? It feels like a celebration of artifice – the artist is playing with the hyper-real, the unreal, and the artificial. I am reminded of Henri Rousseau, an artist whose work was full of a longing for something not quite attainable. Perhaps Babak-Matveev is also interested in this, and is dreaming of an unattainable kind of beauty. Artists are in constant conversation, sharing ideas across time. Like painting, this piece embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, inviting multiple interpretations.