Matthew Lloyd’s work begins through a novel premise: there is a figure who is bound by a stage. Framed by its proscenium, living in-between its curtain and dressing room, this figure recites the scripts and performs specific scenarios, prepared from an unknown agency, in a theatre without an audience. Isolated, this character has been stripped, or rather dressed, without subjectivity as each act further hollows out their disposition and impersonality. To be oneself less, they identify as a subject and object of their own gradual absence. Leading this impoverished theatre to give precedence to the looming void from the vacant spectators, to perversely spill on stage, inscribing itself in a backdrop, as a prop, or an antagonist understudy in these self-referential performances. Whose acts with missing pieces and undisclosed details, not only evokes links to the outside world, but perpetually suspends the figures' reality to hold existence without clear destinations. As if rehearsing for a play that will never open, or facing a curtain that will never be lifted, this world starts with endings as the main show.
Behind the scenes, this conceptual allegory concentrates Lloyd’s art in an unreconciled reality that is cinematically alluring yet strangely inaccessible. As if witnessing a secret ceremony, that is indifferent to spectatorship. Lloyd’s narrative establishes itself from a restricted inner cordon where a philosophical and psychoanalytical excavation on the nature of art, the politics of aesthetics, and ethics of artistic autonomy, is given the spotlight. Addressing the uncomfortable and dissonant, the collapse of meaning and state of exceptions, the focus becomes in the confrontation of a reality violently subtracting from us. Referencing concentration camps, memorial sites, crime scenes, courtrooms, the comedic stage, or the exhibition. Lloyd, through staging the void as an ever-changing presence for the lack, loss, disruptive, contradictory, and hostile. Perversely inhabits the unsettling vacancy that opens as a disparity, due to prohibitions of acceptance and representation, against unimaginable events and circumstances. Drawing our attention to the hidden negative realities that occupy these intermissions of dissociation; a disembodied object-voice, languages' plight to ground the self, the rejection of subjectivity, or the denial of a symbolic order. Where the apparatus of the fictional theatre becomes an explicit platform to play out these violations, prohibitions and dissensions in art, politics or philosophy, to hollow out their masks and veils of meaning, and to face such ‘empty’, ‘dead’ and ‘dying’ concepts earnestly and comically.
