The sum of our parts by Matthew Ricci

Size (cm): 100 x 130
Oil paint and soft pastel on canvas

Two figures meet at the canvas’s centre, caught between struggle and embrace, neither fully separable from the other. Built through automatic drawing and layered oil paint, the forms emerged gradually, earlier marks left visible beneath reworked surfaces as psychological sediment.

The striped shirts and shared gold arc are the painting’s symbolic core. The clothing speaks to inherited roles and archetypes: the respectable, the contained, the wanting-to-be-pure. The halo bridges both heads, belonging to neither alone. Two aspects of the same self, dressed in the same aspirations, caught in the same unresolved negotiation.

The work belongs to a broader practice concerned with individuation, the slow process of becoming a distinct self. What the painting holds is the moment before that separation is complete, when the self and what it is distinguishing itself from are still made of the same material.