Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Acrylic, Oil Stick, Spray Paint on Canvas, 2024, 190 x 250 cm, Photograph curtesy of Anne Freitag

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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants is one of the most expansive canvases in the Mr Fat Plastic series. Figures crowd the surface: a hollowed body at the center, an angel stretched into cruciform, a cartoon-like head with glaring eyes, and a neon-outlined face glowing as if from another realm. On the far left, another figure intrudes, as though stepping in from outside the frame, giving the composition an uncanny, otherworldly charge.

The painting stages a theatre of masks and grotesques. Each form is unstable, at once parody and archetype, creating a carnival of bodies where no identity is fixed. This instability reflects one of the central themes of Mr Fat Plastic: the mask as both concealment and revelation, a performance that destabilizes authority while exposing deeper psychological tensions.

The work carries affinities with expressive traditions such as Philip Guston’s cartoonish figuration, Cobra’s anarchic energy, and Bacon’s psychological intensity, yet it mutates these echoes into a contemporary language. Neon outlines and glowing forms resonate with the light of screens and surveillance, pointing to the ways technology fragments and flattens identity. Against this, the raw canvas and urgent brushwork assert painting as resistance, a living and embodied process that insists on presence.

Playful yet unsettling, grotesque yet monumental, the painting embodies the paradox at the core of Mr Fat Plastic: critique performed through excess, rebellion enacted through masks, and painting as both carnival and remedy.

Red Square, Acrylic, Oil Stick, Spray Paint on Canvas, 2024, 190 x 205 cm, Photograph curtesy of Anne Freitag

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Red Square is anchored by a bold red block on the canvas. It can be read as many things at once: a screen, a television, a device, a blockage, or a void. Its presence is sharpened by the smaller blue square nearby, a counterpoint that creates polarity within the composition. Behind them stretches a field of green, a backdrop that suggests a collective unconscious from which all the figures and marks emerge.

Scattered across the surface are fragile symbols and presences. Crude houses appear like blueprints, tally marks and crosses hint at systems of order that collapse back into gesture, and a seated figure carries traces of the everyday within this otherwise unstable theatre. At the bottom, a small green figure leans against one of the houses, its halo-like head casting it as saint, alien, or self in transit.

Loosely painted yet deliberate, the work reads like both stage and diary, a catalogue of lived experience translated into symbols. Architectural forms and devices suggest containment, but their instability reveals the fragility of those systems. What results is a universe of unstable meanings, where each element holds its own space while participating in a larger field of tension.

Red Square reflects one of the central tensions of Mr Fat Plastic: order undone by parody, authority transformed into mask, and the unconscious revealed through deliberate and unstable gesture.

The Two In Blue, Acrylic, Spray Paint on Canvas, 2024, 150 x 190 cm, Photograph curtesy of Anne Freitag

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The Two in Blue depicts a pair of tall figures stepping forward as though into an unfamiliar world. Their overlapping forms blur the line between separate bodies and a single shared presence.

Around them, symbols and figures create an otherworldly stage. Rows of Xs descend like measures of time, a red sun glows against the pale sky, and a colossal head hovers in the distance, part landscape and part apparition. A smaller red figure lingers nearby, neither ally nor adversary, its role deliberately ambiguous.

Gestural brushwork, spray paint, and exposed canvas give the scene an archaic yet contemporary charge. The painting invites the viewer to think of exploration not as mastery but as openness: stepping into the unknown without assuming clarity. Myths, archetypes, and lived fragments coexist here, not to be categorised as good or bad, but to be experienced as part of a larger, unfolding journey.

Three Heads, Acrylic, Spray Paint on Canvas, 2024, 100 x 130 cm, Photograph curtesy of Anne Freitag

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Three Heads presents a trio of figures that hover between the archaic and the contemporary. A monumental head with closed green eyes looms at the center like a deity, flanked by a skeletal mask with dripping yellow eyes and a smaller votive-like figure below. Their scale and relation suggest ritual hierarchy, yet none of them settle into clear roles. They flicker between divinity, parody, and witness.

The triangular sign marked “ON” crystallizes this ambiguity. It functions as both rune and device, echoing the transition from sacred ritual to technological command. Where masks once opened pathways to gods and ancestors, here they reference the new gods of techno-feudalism: invisible systems of consumption and control that dominate daily life.

Painted on raw canvas with spray paint and gestural marks, the work carries the scars of immediacy. Neon hues clash with exposed fabric, collapsing the distance between ancient ritual object and digital avatar.

In line with the Mr Fat Plastic manifesto, Three Heads treats identity as mask and performance, unstable and shifting. It parodies the omnipresence of today’s technological deities while recalling the sacred charge of older ritual masks. What emerges is a theatre of instability, where ritual is displaced by the consumption of goods, and parody becomes a way to expose this shift. 

Fragments of Ghosts Procrastinating, Acrylic, Spray Paint on Canvas, 2024, 190 x 160 cm, Photograph curtesy of Anne Freitag

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Fragments of Ghosts (Procrastination) captures the restless state of distraction, where figures and forms appear but never fully resolve. A skeletal mask, a dangling foot, a flat blue cross, and scattered symbols hover across the canvas, each fragment like an unfinished thought.

The title points to procrastination not as laziness, but as a condition shaped by the systems we inhabit. Social media platforms mine attention and reframe identity as “the creator,” demanding constant performance while leaving behind depletion. In this work, those pressures materialize as ghosts: half-formed figures and abandoned marks, traces of energy pulled away.

Painted in a deliberately incomplete manner, with exposed canvas and unresolved gestures, the work personifies procrastination itself. It becomes both a diary of artistic struggle and a critique of how contemporary tools fracture focus.

Within the Mr Fat Plastic language, identity here is unstable and spectral, caught between mask and absence. What remains are fragments, ghosts of presence, ghosts of gestures, ghosts of attention drained into the endless circuitry of the screen.