Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants unfolds as a vast, unstable tableau, where fragmented figures crowd together in a searing field of red. The composition is dissonant, as though each presence belongs to a different register of reality. At the center stands a hollowed body, painted in urgent strokes of red and white, skeletal yet monumental. Above it, an angel stretches its limbs into a cruciform gesture, caught between transcendence and collapse. To the right, a ghostly green head outlined in neon orange hovers like a schematic imprint, more trace than body, as if lifted from surveillance technology. Below, a cartoonish figure leans forward with glaring eyes, its agitation bordering on comic. And to the far left, another head intrudes, stepping into the scene from outside the frame. No single figure stabilizes the canvas; each is provisional, flickering, unstable.

The saturated red field sets the stage. It recalls the language of spectacle, banners, propaganda, mass gatherings, but here that collective clarity collapses into psychological charge. Instead of uniting, the red destabilises, reframing urgency as theatre. The painting becomes a stage where archetypes and caricatures intermingle: angel, witness, trickster, apparition. They resist resolution, flickering between parody and pathos, mask and revelation.

In this way, the work embodies the spirit of the Mr Fat Plastic manifesto. The manifesto declares: “I am many and I am one. I am swarm and I am icon. I am the mask that laughs at itself.” Here, the swarm appears as a crowded field of masks, none fixed, all provisional. The figures are not truths but performances, avatars that oscillate between archetype and parody. Their instability mirrors the manifesto’s insistence that identity mutates, leaks, and multiplies.

The angelic figure, glowing yet faltering, embodies this paradox. It recalls both sacred icon and digital glow, collapsing transcendence into mediation. The green schematic head echoes the flattening of self into a digital profile, an imprint more data than body. The cartoonish witness exaggerates to the point of absurdity, undermining authority through parody. Each figure, in its own way, enacts the manifesto’s claim: “Do not mistake me for truth. I am performing. I am a parody. I am plastic.”

Materially, the painting reinforces this resistance. Painted on unprimed canvas, it absorbs each mark directly. Drips, revisions, scars remain visible. The process is immediate, raw, refusing polish. This rawness embodies the manifesto’s closing insistence: “This is not confession. This is survival. This is play.” The work resists being a pristine commodity, instead asserting painting as an act of presence, urgent, unstable, alive.

Art-historical resonances ripple through the painting, Bacon’s distortion, Cobra’s anarchic energy, Guston’s cartoonish figuration, Basquiat’s urgency, German Expressionism’s intensity, but none dominate. They are not fixed references but shifting echoes, fragments absorbed and reconfigured into a new language. The title gestures to lineage, but not as stable inheritance. To “stand on the shoulders of giants” here is to engage history ambivalently, acknowledging its presence while mutating it, neither revealing nor rejecting but transforming it into something unstable, contemporary, and alive.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants is ultimately a theatre of instability. Figures flicker between roles, the red ground saturates but destabilises, the act of painting itself resists closure. It stages, in pictorial form, the paradox of Mr Fat Plastic: that in a world of spectacle, alienation, and technological glow, identity can only survive through multiplicity, parody, and play.

The painting does not resolve its figures into heroes or villains, sacred or profane. Instead, it insists on ambiguity, on the refusal of categorisation. It offers the viewer not answers but an invitation to step into the swarm, to hold the instability, to recognise that survival itself can be theatre.

Red Square

Red Square unfolds as a charged constellation of symbols, figures, and zones of color. At its heart lies the red square itself: flat, bold, and ambiguous. It can be read as a screen, a device, a warning sign, a blockage, or a void. Its meaning remains open, shifting depending on the viewer’s gaze. Balanced against a smaller blue square, the composition creates a polarity of intensities: red as confrontation, blue as calm, opposites locked in dialogue. Behind them stretches a ground of green, a loose field that evokes the collective unconscious, the psychic terrain from which figures and forms arise.

Around these anchors, the canvas hosts a scattering of presences. At the top right sits a loosely painted figure, rendered with a mixture of authority and fragility. Its body carries small details that seem lifted from everyday life, incidental traces that fold the mundane into the painting’s symbolic theatre. To the left, tally marks and crosses evoke systems of order, bureaucracy, or data, yet their wavering execution destabilizes their authority, turning code into gesture. Below, schematic houses are drawn as crude blueprints, signs of domestication and containment that seem too fragile to endure. At the bottom, a small green figure leans against one of these houses, its head encircled by a disc. The figure reads as saint, alien, or self, emblematic of a presence caught in flux, suspended between shelter and displacement, containment and escape.

Each element is painted with deliberate concentration. The red square, the seated figure, the schematic houses, and the small green apparition all stand in their own zones, carrying symbolic weight. They do not merge into a single narrative but coexist as fragments, each revealing something of the unconscious. The canvas becomes less a scene than a universe, a field of concentrated gestures where meaning accumulates through juxtaposition.

What emerges is a dialogue between order and instability. Architectural structures, grids, and devices suggest containment, while the figures and gestures destabilize them, parodying their authority. The painting resists clarity, instead producing a kind of unstable theatre where systems falter and lived experience surfaces in symbolic form.

Red Square embodies one of the central paradoxes of Mr Fat Plastic: the way authority collapses into parody, the way everyday traces become mythic symbols, and the way the unconscious is revealed through deliberate yet unstable gestures. Both stage and diary, it catalogues fragments of lived life while opening them onto a collective psychic space.

The Two in Blue

The Two in Blue presents a scene suspended between myth and immediacy. Two towering blue figures dominate the right side of the canvas, their outlines overlapping as if caught in the process of splitting or merging. Their gestures suggest movement forward, but it is hesitant, almost stumbling, the awkward progress of explorers crossing into unfamiliar territory. The instability of their number reinforces this sense of uncertainty. The painting was once titled The Three in Blue, later becoming The Two in Blue. Has one figure vanished, collapsed into the others, or was it never there at all? This instability of naming and counting foregrounds the fragility of categorisation itself. Even numbers, which promise certainty, become unreliable.

The surrounding field heightens the atmosphere of disorientation. Blue Xs cascade vertically across the canvas, like a measure of time slowing down, marking not seconds but an uncanny rhythm. Above, a red sun hangs flat against the pale ground, both cosmic and artificial, glowing with otherworldly force. To the left, a smaller red figure appears like a witness or trickster, costume-like and ambiguous in role. At the center, a colossal head looms: its wide, tooth-filled mouth both grotesque and monumental, its form slipping between deity, mask, mountain, or apparition. These presences feel symbolic yet resist resolution into a single system of meaning. They hold their ground as mysteries, each insisting on its own authority.

The painting resonates with traditions of allegory and visionary journey. One thinks of Dante’s Divine Comedy, where the human protagonist stumbles through unfamiliar realms populated by figures both terrifying and sublime. Or René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet, where humans appear as fragile intruders in a world of giants. Yet these echoes are not illustrations. They surface unconsciously, reconfigured through the immediacy of paint. Spray paint hovers over gestural brushwork, exposed canvas creates breathing space between figures, and the forms are rendered in a deliberately archaic style. The painting collapses temporal distance, staging timeless archetypes through the language of contemporary mark-making.

Beneath the imagery runs a deeper invitation. The explorers are not only figures within the painting, but mirrors of the viewer. Their stumbling advance suggests the condition of stepping into a reality one does not yet understand. The painting resists offering answers; instead it cultivates openness. It reminds us that exploration is less about mastery and more about vulnerability, less about naming and more about staying with mystery.

This refusal of resolution pushes against our cultural tendency to categorise. Too often, myths and archetypes are flattened into moral symbols of good or bad, hero or villain, sacred or profane. In The Two in Blue, these categories collapse. The colossal head is neither wholly deity nor wholly monster. The red figure is neither ally nor adversary. The explorers are neither triumphant nor defeated. The painting insists on nuance, ambiguity, and multiplicity. It suggests that archetypes are not fixed images but processes, shifting presences encountered along the journey of individuation.

The painting’s origins underscore this openness. It was made quickly, almost automatically, in a moment of exhaustion, as if the scene revealed itself rather than being carefully constructed. In retrospect, it resonates with personal memory, the alien feeling of arriving in a new city, the strangeness of entering a world one does not yet understand. Yet these autobiographical traces never bind the work. Instead, they enrich its archetypal force, allowing the personal and the mythic to coexist within the same surface.

The Two in Blue ultimately stages an encounter with the unknown. It offers not resolution but invitation: to remain open to mystery, to accept the instability of categories, to allow the journey to unfold without presuming to know its end. In doing so, it reflects one of the most vital undercurrents of Mr Fat Plastic: that art can be both diary and myth, both fragment and archetype, both raw gesture and timeless allegory. It is a painting that holds the viewer not by explaining, but by asking them to step forward, like the figures themselves, into a world they do not yet understand.

Three Heads

Three Heads stages a vision that is both ritual and parody, sacred and absurd. At the center, a monumental head with green lips and closed eyelids floats like an idol. Its scale suggests a cosmic deity, a presence once invoked through masks in ritual traditions. Yet its cartoon distortions transform reverence into instability, shifting the sacred into something provisional, exposed. Around it orbit two companions: a skeletal mask with dripping yellow eyes that glare outward like wounds or ritual markings, and a smaller votive-like figure below, fragile and puppet-like. Together, they form a strange hierarchy of gods and attendants, but one that never resolves into clarity.

In ancient traditions, masks were not decorations but thresholds. They were worn to channel spirits, gods, ancestors, and archetypes larger than the self. They transformed the human body into a site of communion. Three Heads acknowledges this lineage, but it re-stages it for the present. The new gods of today are not cosmic but technological, not sacred but systemic. They are the omnipresent powers of techno-feudalism: the platforms, corporations, and networks of consumption that shape our lives with invisible authority.

The triangular glyph marked “ON” makes this collapse of ritual into device explicit. It reads as both a rune and a switch, an invocation and an instruction. Where once sacred signs connected communities to the rhythms of land and cosmos, here the sign opens only into the endless circuitry of consumption. The deity is no longer the sun or the storm, but the machine that cannot stop running, consuming without pause.

In this sense, the painting becomes a parody, not of gods themselves but of the absurdity of worshipping systems of extraction as though they were divine. The monumental head recalls a cosmic deity, but its cartoon grin exposes its hollowness. The glowing eyes of the mask exaggerate their own authority to the point of absurdity. The puppet-figure below appears less like a devotee and more like a witness to collapse. The parody is both humorous and unsettling, revealing the fragility of these new gods even as they dominate our lives.

Materially, the painting reinforces this ritual parody. Painted on raw canvas with spray paint and gestural brushwork, it leaves its scars and drips exposed, like an object unearthed from both an ancient ruin and a contemporary city wall. Neon hues vibrate against exposed fabric, collapsing temporal distance so that archaic idol and digital avatar coexist on the same surface.

Within the broader language of Mr Fat Plastic, Three Heads embodies the manifesto’s logic: “I am swarm and I am icon. Do not mistake me for the truth. I am performing. I am a parody.” The heads are not portraits but masks, shifting avatars through which an invisible, omnipresent being speaks. They channel the sacred lineage of ritual masks while parodying the new gods of capital and technology. They do not reveal essence, but perform instability.

Ultimately, Three Heads is a painting of transition. It asks what becomes of ritual when its gods are replaced by systems of surveillance and consumption. It invites us to see both the absurdity and the danger of techno-feudalism’s omnipresence, while remembering that masks, whether ancient or contemporary, remain thresholds. They conceal, they reveal, they parody, they protect. Here, they leave us in a space where divinity is both mocked and mourned, where the sacred has been displaced but not extinguished.

Fragments of Ghosts (Procrastination)

Fragments of Ghosts (Procrastination) stages the condition of being pulled apart by distraction. The canvas is scattered with incomplete gestures: a skeletal mask with hollow eyes, a dangling foot that never resolves into a body, a flat blue cross that blocks the center of the image like an error screen. Pools of red paint seep across the lower figure as though energy itself has drained away. Nothing fully coheres. Instead, the painting is a constellation of interruptions, fragments of ghosts.

The title sharpens this condition. Procrastination is not framed here as laziness or avoidance but as a state produced by the systems we live inside. Social media platforms, designed to mine consciousness and hold attention, promise empowerment to the “creator” while quietly fracturing focus. They demand constant production, constant self-performance, while leaving behind depletion and ghostly residues of what could not be finished. The work channels this tension directly. It becomes both a diary of artistic struggle and a critique of the platforms that frame procrastination as personal failure rather than systemic design.

The gestures themselves embody this split. Areas of raw canvas remain exposed, figures dissolve into outlines, and paint sits half-resolved as if arrested mid-thought. This incompleteness is not incidental but integral: procrastination is personified in the brushwork. The skeletal figure at the right reads as both self-portrait and mask, the artist caught in the loop of distraction, rendered ghostlike by a system that converts presence into performance.

Symbols compound the effect. The blue cross hovers like a crash screen or a cancelled action, turning interruption into icon. The flat blue window and scattered glyphs recall the architecture of screens, the boxes and grids through which attention is captured. The painting itself becomes a haunted interface, populated by half-formed images and drained figures.

Within the lexicon of Mr Fat Plastic, Fragments of Ghosts visualises the instability of identity under these conditions. The role of “the creator” is both mask and demand, imposed by the system as a form of identity that is always already compromised. What remains are fragments — ghosts of gestures, ghosts of selves, ghosts of rituals displaced by the omnipresence of devices.

Ultimately, the painting refuses completion as an act of both exposure and resistance. It acknowledges the depletion of attention under techno-feudalism but transforms it into image, into theatre. In doing so, it reframes procrastination not as absence but as a haunted presence: the ghosts of everything we could not finish, everything interrupted, everything mined away.