Matthew Blackburn’s Golden Age paintings
Matthew Blackburn turns PS1 controllers, Rubik’s cubes and cereal bowls into vanitas still lifes, asking what our nostalgia says about who we are.
Why it matters
Matthew Blackburn appears in the group exhibition Tomorrow is Listening at Rust-en-Vrede Gallery; this item is dated 27 August 2026. His paintings recast everyday objects from the early 2000s — PlayStation controllers, Rubik’s cubes, Coke bottles and cereal bowls — in the language of classical still life to probe nostalgia, consumerism and the passage of time.
What the work looks like
Take Saturday Morning 2001: Blackburn paints a bedroom through a fisheye perspective so the viewer feels literally held in the scene, controller in hand. Nearby Sunday Morning 2001 pares the idea back, but keeps playful visual links — the Froot Loops in a bowl echo the PlayStation button colours, a small compositional wink that ties childhood routine to iconography.
How he makes it
Working in acrylic on hardboard, Blackburn builds images from photos of staged props and layered brushwork until surfaces read as photographic. He frames finished pieces in museum-style gold, deliberately marrying mass-produced pop objects with a classical finish. The result is polished but uncanny: everyday kitsch elevated into a vanitas vocabulary.
“I’ve always been drawn to nostalgia,” he tells Creative Boom.
That interest isn’t sentimental alone. Blackburn treats nostalgia as a two-sided feeling — comforting yet tinged with loss — and uses modern consumer items to ask what we collect, why we cling to certain memories and how those objects mark time.
Background and traction
Self-taught and based in Johannesburg, Blackburn left school in 2012 and went full-time as an artist in late 2020. He entered Sasol New Signatures every year from 2021, making the top 100 twice and winning a merit award in the top seven in 2023 with Suffocation. Since then he took second place at the Vuleka art competition in 2025, reached the Portrait Awards top 40 twice, completed a residency at Rosemary Hill and shown at venues from the Pretoria Art Museum to the RMB Latitudes Art Fair.
Across the Golden Age series, Blackburn asks a quiet question about life and replay: if your future self could play your present life, would it be a game worth playing? The answer hangs in carefully rendered cereal bowls and controllers — familiar, slightly strange, and built to make you think.
Something wrong on this page? Tell us and we will fix it.
