In Snow White, Mata Lee revisits a mythic figure from the collective imagination by slipping her into the artist’s singular universe, where popular iconography intersects with identity distortion. Here, the artist diverts the familiar aesthetic of “paint-by-number” paintings—symbols of mechanical, playful, and pre-programmed reproduction—and confronts it with the unsettling, hyper-contemporary presence of a face that is at once stylized, smooth, and intensely embodied.
The princess, rendered deliberately schematic through a childlike turquoise outline, seems suspended between two visual regimes: that of naïve illustration, and that of the “Mata Lee persona”—elongated face, widely spaced gaze, fine mouth, enigmatic expression. The contrast between the numbered structure and the elaborately painted head operates as a metaphor for fragmented identity: what is meant to be “easy to reproduce” becomes an arena of doubt, projection, and subjectivity.
Surrounded by rabbits and codified creatures, Snow White emerges as a figure impossible to reduce to her numbers, resisting the logic of “filling in the correct color.” The work plays with the notions of the fairy tale, the cliché, and the fabrication of images, revealing a tension between programmed innocence and inner complexity—a central theme in Mata Lee’s practice.
In Snow White, Mata Lee revisits a mythic figure from the collective imagination by slipping her into the artist’s singular universe, where popular iconography intersects with identity distortion. Here, the artist diverts the familiar aesthetic of “paint-by-number” paintings—symbols of mechanical, playful, and pre-programmed reproduction—and confronts it with the unsettling, hyper-contemporary presence of a face that is at once stylized, smooth, and intensely embodied.
The princess, rendered deliberately schematic through a childlike turquoise outline, seems suspended between two visual regimes: that of naïve illustration, and that of the “Mata Lee persona”—elongated face, widely spaced gaze, fine mouth, enigmatic expression. The contrast between the numbered structure and the elaborately painted head operates as a metaphor for fragmented identity: what is meant to be “easy to reproduce” becomes an arena of doubt, projection, and subjectivity.
Surrounded by rabbits and codified creatures, Snow White emerges as a figure impossible to reduce to her numbers, resisting the logic of “filling in the correct color.” The work plays with the notions of the fairy tale, the cliché, and the fabrication of images, revealing a tension between programmed innocence and inner complexity—a central theme in Mata Lee’s practice.
Une réinterprétation contemporaine de Blanche-Neige dans une esthétique de peinture à numéros, où l’innocence du conte rencontre la profondeur identitaire propre à Mata Lee. Huile sur toile 48 × 40 pouces.
