Why Material Still Matters in Contemporary Art

Why Material Still Matters in Contemporary Art

Contemporary art is now encountered through screens before almost anything else. We discover artists on Instagram, browse gallery programs online, save images, compare works, enlarge details and, increasingly, purchase artworks without ever having seen them in person. This has made art considerably more accessible, but it has also changed the conditions under which we look at it.

On a screen, an artwork inevitably begins to behave more like an image than an object. Scale becomes relative, weight disappears and texture is compressed into visual information, which means that a painting measuring two metres can occupy exactly the same rectangle on a phone as a work measuring twenty centimetres. Material matters precisely because it resists this flattening and reminds us that an artwork occupies space, carries weight and has been physically constructed rather than existing only as an image.

Within the current HAZEGALLERY program, several artists approach material from very different positions. Francesca Borgo builds paintings through layers of acrylic, natural sand and mineral pigments, Serhio Lichi allows found materials, environmental conditions and place to enter directly into the formation of his works, while Sasha Zaitseva moves towards sculpture, where the physical object becomes inseparable from the image itself. Their practices are visually distinct, yet each demonstrates that material is not simply the substance from which an artwork is made, but can become an active part of its meaning.

The Surface as a Record

In Francesca Borgo’s paintings, surface develops gradually through processes of accumulation, erosion and reveal. Working with acrylic, natural sand and mineral pigments, she builds layers that are added, partially concealed, removed and exposed again, creating a physical process that echoes the geological language running through her practice, where sedimentation, water, wind and shifting terrain become ways of thinking about human relationships and change.

Her paintings frequently suggest landscapes without describing identifiable places. Borgo refers to these spaces as emotional geographies, where processes borrowed from the natural world become connected to memory, closeness, absence and the traces people leave in one another over time.

The use of sand is therefore more than a tactile decision. It creates surfaces that appear to have undergone their own histories, as areas accumulate, fracture, disappear and re-emerge, allowing the finished painting to retain visible evidence of how it came into being. In works such as Shapes of Becoming, Liquid Ridge and Shaped by the Same Waters, the image cannot be fully separated from the physical structure of the surface because the material process is already embedded in the way the work is read.

A photograph can reproduce the composition with considerable accuracy, but it can only approximate the experience of a surface whose appearance shifts with distance, light and the viewer’s position, which is precisely where the distinction between seeing an image and encountering an artwork becomes important.

When Material Arrives With a History

Serhio Lichi approaches material from another direction. Working across painting, assemblage, objects and performance, his practice incorporates found and vernacular materials into works shaped by specific environments and geographical contexts.

A found object never enters an artwork as neutral matter because it already carries a previous function, a place, a history and physical evidence of use. Once incorporated into Lichi’s work, these associations are not erased by the artist’s authorship but become part of the final object, allowing material to contribute information that cannot be produced through representation alone.

This changes the conventional relationship between painter and support. Rather than beginning with a neutral surface and placing an image upon it, Lichi allows existing matter, environmental conditions, accident and transformation to influence the way a work develops, creating a tension between intention and circumstances that cannot be completely controlled.

Place therefore enters the work not simply as something depicted, but through the actual substances, objects and processes from which the work is formed. In a practice developed across different geographical contexts, this becomes particularly significant because each environment contributes its own material vocabulary, while the artist determines how those elements are reorganised into a new visual structure.

The resulting works retain a certain degree of instability, and this instability is essential to their character because the material never becomes entirely subordinate to the image.

When the Image Becomes an Object

With Sasha Zaitseva, the relationship between image and material shifts again as her masks occupy a territory between sculpture, object and image, combining strong visual identities with an unavoidable physical presence.

The mask is particularly charged as a form because it immediately implies a relationship with the human body, even when no body is present. It can suggest protection, disguise, transformation, confrontation or ritual, while its scale inevitably asks the viewer to imagine the absent face to which it might belong.

Works such as Origin Mask, Confrontation Mask and RedRum Mask operate within this ambiguity. They are objects intended to be looked at, yet their proportions and construction continually suggest the possibility of being worn, encountered or inhabited, creating a psychological relationship with the viewer that a purely two-dimensional image would struggle to produce.

Photography can communicate their colour, ornament and general form, but standing in front of the objects introduces volume, proximity and an awareness of human scale that changes the encounter entirely. The work shares physical space with the viewer, and this simple fact alters the way it is perceived.

The Problem With the Perfect Image

Digital presentation has created an interesting contradiction for contemporary art because artists and galleries increasingly depend on images that reproduce works as accurately and attractively as possible, while the improvement of those images can make it easier to forget that every reproduction remains incomplete.

An artwork photographed beautifully against a neutral background can appear entirely knowable, although much of its physical information has already disappeared. A textured surface changes as light moves across it, a sculptural object alters when viewed from another position, pigment absorbs or reflects light differently depending on the surrounding space, and scale can make a work intimate or confrontational in ways that no screen can fully reproduce.

This does not diminish the importance of digital presentation. For galleries working internationally, the screen has become one of the primary spaces through which collectors encounter new artists, and an online viewing experience can provide an extraordinary degree of access to works that would otherwise remain geographically distant.

The more relevant question is how to use that digital space without pretending that it replaces the physical artwork. Detail photographs, studio views, installation images and videos showing surface, scale and movement are valuable precisely because they restore some of the information removed by a single frontal image, allowing the viewer to understand more clearly what kind of object exists beyond the screen.

Collecting Beyond the Screen

For collectors, paying attention to material offers another way of evaluating an artwork beyond subject matter or immediate visual attraction, because the way a work has been constructed can reveal as much about an artist’s practice as the image itself.

Looking closely at the behaviour of the surface, considering how the work has been built, observing how material supports or complicates the image and imagining how scale or changing light might alter the experience can provide a much richer understanding of a work without requiring specialist knowledge. What it requires instead is time and a willingness to look beyond the first impression.

This becomes particularly relevant when buying art online, where decisions are inevitably mediated through photographs. A strong artwork should communicate through reproduction, but the most interesting works often contain qualities that reproduction cannot completely resolve, leaving something that still has to be discovered in the physical encounter.

At a moment when images circulate endlessly and can be copied, resized and consumed within seconds, the specificity of a physical artwork becomes increasingly significant. An original work has a particular scale, surface, weight and material history that cannot simply be transferred from one context to another without changing the experience of it.

The screen may be where the encounter begins, but material is often what gives the artwork its permanence once the image has passed.

Francesca Borgo, Serhio Lichi and Sasha Zaitseva are represented by HAZEGALLERY. Selected works are currently available through the gallery at haze.gallery

Text: CEO & Curator Irina Rusinovich