Malik Roberts(b. 1990 Brooklyn, New York) is a Brooklyn based painter of fine art and an adroit practitioner of multimedia arts annexing the image plane and the conventions of figuration for an explicit endeavor in distilling, with the force and clarity of revelation, an essence of fibrous multiplicity that characterizes the being and becoming of black culture, as well as the virtualities and dregs of human nature. Compositions cohere as cinematic crescendos of perspectival and relational elements seemingly disparate in appearance but subordinate to the same whole in a prismatic synthesis capturing an intensity and verve of subject and theme reminiscent of predecessors within the vast Cubist tradition. In an age where the image plane bows obsequious to forces of deluded self-creation, rapacious opprobrium, and the techno-hypnosis emitted on the passive screens of hypermodernity, Roberts constructs a robust “way of seeing” the Other that is explicitly metaphysical and unapologetically witnesses the particular — the idiosyncratic.
His paintings express a visual vernacular that is rhizomatic in nature, spurning the constraints of the revealed naturalism typical of contemporary figuration for a type of concealment of geometric articulation exuding nuance, depth, and pure essence — the recorded hand conjures a form best elucidated as a Cubo-Prismism. This rhizomatic nature allows for “witnessing” — of context, of the interpersonal, and of (the)time(s). As a consequence, it allows for, as well, “reflection” — the uniting of an inner world with an outer world.
The criterion from which the aesthetic language explicated on his canvases and embodied in his everyday life is polyphyletic in its make up, emerging from a rich tapestry of experience comprising exposure to various disciplines and outlets of creative expression, countenance with a polyvocal creed, and the task of integrating such within the ever evolving, floating “context” of American cultural life. Growing up inundated with the persecutory caricatures and specter conjuring of American multicultural and racial tensions — in Atlanta by way of Brooklyn or Brooklyn by way of Atlanta — Roberts found transcendence and reconciliation in the world and character building of cinema, claiming as his utility the vector for which the actor serves as extension — the director — to conduct and refract a thematic exposition of the natures as demonstrated by various archetypical expressions Roberts has witnessed recurring throughout his cultural experience.
Whether it be in the melanated palettes of reds, browns, yellows to express a resilience postured of the subject, a deep melancholic blue-black grief, or luscious hues demonstrating the opulence of graceful humility — stirring compositional chiaroscuro inflected scenes reminiscent of the emotivism and the sublime grandiosity of the High Renaissance, the Romantic, cohere — in an almost dramaturgical fashion — embodied subjects in spectacles and expressive postures as old as time depicted as an eternal recurrence tearing into the spatial and temporal fabric of history to traverse into the black context. Think the allegories of Juice(1992), Above The Rim(1994) — BELLY(1998), to the allegories of Wisdom and Strength(1565), Madonna and Child (1613), and The Nightmare(1781)
Roberts speaks the poetry of how the particulars, his people, deal with the panoply of human nature — how they aspire, what they endure. An imperative sowed in him through a sober grounding in the metaphysics espoused in the Knowledge of Self teachings of the Five Percenter Nation; endowed to him generously by a father who knew all to well the tutelage that awaited his son should he not be. The dissonance “black” moderns confront is palpable, and this tension is clear in the work. Weaving themes of persecution, aspiration, and rootedness, Roberts courts the polysemic in his embrace of traditions and aesthetic logics of a “dominant” culture often responsible historically for the cultural depictions of his people in negativity, revealing not only a sensitivity to the formidable and enduring existence of his people, but also to the Other in a reconciliatory expression of fantasia. In his own word “Who we are, how they paint us, and who we want to be.”
A thematic constant in Roberts work is complexity — dispelling the notion that one is the sum of one’s part(s). In a way, it’s a spiritual struggle of excavating revelation between and betwixt entities of persona and interiority. In another, a journey of realizing and actualizing the two in integration — a motif expressed in the angular splitting of the visage often in the vain of a type of mythopoetics of Janus expressed imagistically.
When asked why not legibility, why not comprehensibility, he simply stated — in a laconic fashion typically reserved for nuisance — “because people are not that”.
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In 2016 Roberts' politically charged mural on display at First Street Green Graffiti Park in downtown Manhattan caught the attention of Scholastic's National Programs team. The artist was subsequently selected to serve as a juror for Scholastic's distinguished "Art and Writing Awards." In November 2017, Roberts had his first solo show at ABXY Gallery in Manhattan. Entitled, "Stolen," works in the show focused on the misappropriation of black culture in contemporary media. In 2018, Nike featured the artist’s work at their NYC Air Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In November 2018, Roberts debuted his second solo show at ABXY Gallery in Manhattan. Entitled, “BLK & BLUE,” works in the show focused on the issue of mental illness in communities of color. In 2019, his work was selected for public display in No Longer Empty’s (after)care exhibition. After contributing artwork to the papal arts education initiative, “Scholas Ocurrentes,“ Roberts was invited Vatican city for a private audience with his Holiness. There, the artist presented Pope Francis with a painting of a Black Christ, which was received enthusiastically. The work will remain in the papal collection.