Rene Matic’s Silhouettes of Refusal
The first known photograph presents a series of outlines of rooftops taken from a second-story window by Nicéphore Niépce in 1827, an experiment using rudimentary materials coupled with a long exposure time. Viewing View from the Window at Le Gras today, you will see passages of light and recessed angular structures. The value of the image does not lie in the clarification of place, but rather, in the refraction of light and darkness as a marker of existence, the materiality that both creates and dictates the chasm of the ephemeral. Nothing else is required of this document beyond its role in the evidence of time and the individual as a witness to it.
Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, (1826/27). Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Public Domain
Similarly, in Baby, Rene Matić's second solo exhibition at Chapter, Matić works through the concept of the shadow in photography. In contrast to their earlier work providing high visibility in contemporary subcultures, queerness, blackness, and political fragmentation through direct photographic methods, Matić materializes self-portraits through a silkscreen process, turning images into large-scale monotone canvases. Convincingly, the shadow as a witness of the body, providing such vast information removal, tackles the spectacle that we have been trained to immediately identify with values such as belonging, desire, care, rejection, or otherness.
Rene Matić, Shadow 8, America, 2025. Silkscreen on canvas, 60 7/8 x 41 3/8 in (154.6 x 105.1 cm), unique. Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York. Photo credit: Charles Benton
Matić's silkscreens allow the shadow to at once dictate and resist the terms of a viewer's treatment of the subject as a dead end. The circumventing of values we freely disperse and deploy through clocking, coding, and defending inherited rituals is engaged through these images. Where Matić's earlier photographs prize and confront immediacy and transparency in the personal and intimate realm, these silkscreens refuse, and allow the material process to absorb a voyeurs expectation given the absence of information. They act as stills from fleeting moments of camaraderie, solitude, and affection that potentially dissolve mere moments after the image occurs. Just as the outline of rooftops in Niépce’s first photograph suggests, their value is ephemeral and poetic, unaffected by the fussiness of specificity and personal judgment.
As the shadow in photography has traditionally been perceived as an accident, Matić reframes it so that absence itself becomes form, testimony, and refusal, by using the silhouette, a mechanism that simultaneously avoids and reveals. With such deliberate agency over their process, they use a highly available capture device, the iPhone, disrupting its crucial function, deliberately rejecting the technology’s ability to record detail. This adds to the immediacy of the images, signaling they are not mitigated or staged; they are passing constructions of a life lived, whether in spaces of visibility or erasure.
Rene Matić, Shadow 5, London, 2025. Silkscreen on canvas, 60 7/8 x 41 3/8 in (154.6 x 105.1 cm), unique. Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York. Photo credit: Charles Benton
While many of the images read directly as self-portraits marking a sudden moment of reflection, there is terrain to these unique silkscreens that at times bring them into a relational space: the overhead view of friends trainers on the floor while looking down in Shadow 5, London (2025), and a moment of mutual closeness through an embrace in Shadow 8, America (2025).
Rene Matić, Shadow 9, America, 2025. Silkscreen on canvas, 60 7/8 x 41 3/8 in (154.6 x 105.1 cm), unique. Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York. Photo credit: Charles Benton
This experimental iteration of the image as a silkscreen acts as a testament to the premise of the self that lives across all of Matić's work, regardless of media. Rooted in this conversation is their proximity to the Windrush generation, most of whom were born British citizens, yet politically subjected to detention, denial of citizenship, and threats of deportation, an assault on trust and personhood. This undoubtedly informs Matic's practice to insert the self where they have otherwise been forcefully and purposely excluded. The self-portraits capture this most profoundly, possessing ownership, at times taking up the entire frame, as seen in Shadow 10, America (2025), Shadow 9, America (2025), and Shadow 3, Basel (2025), positioning the body as irrefutable.
Rene Matić, Baby. Installation view, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York. Photo credit: Charles Benton
While most of the canvases in Baby stand alone, a sudden sequence of five canvases suggests a continuous narrative, installed flush together as if unfolding across a single day. The silhouette guides our decoding of the vantage point, yet obscures location, beyond the loose title reference to the country of origin, rendering it irrelevant and placing the memorialization of the body as the ultimate evidence of time and witness.
Rene Matić: Baby is on view at Chapter NY from September 5th to October 18th, 2025.
