Colour Theory: Trump Gets the Oil from Venezuela in Barrels Decorated with the Colours of the Venezuelan Flag.(2026) Matthew Collings
What would you call it then? More than seventy thousand dead. Millions displaced. A proportionate response, is it? No. It’s an act of erasure. Netanyahu’s far-right government have pursued the eradication of Palestine, both its land and its people. It’s called genocide.
Anyone who cannot celebrate the many wonders ‘descendants of Abraham’ have gifted humankind and – at the same time – roundly condemn the violent ultra-Zionism perpetrated by the current Israeli cabinet aren’t just dialectally challenged, they’re out and out cunts.
Well known critic, broadcaster, writer and consummate artist Matthew Collings is not a cunt. He calls out wrongdoing when he sees it. He also makes mesmeric, raw, powerful drawings, many of which magically conjure imagined meetings between artists past and present.
And then there are a few dynamic renderings that seek to convey the horror and pain fascistic despotic figures and indoctrinators – like Trump, Netanyahu, Springer, Murdoch… – visit on people, characters who pursue conflict and division to further their own ends, to distract from their own gross crimes and/or malignant agendas.
Collings’ new flyingleaps poster is titled Colour Theory: Trump Gets the Oil from Venezuela in Barrels Decorated with the Colours of the Venezuelan Flag. Pretty straightforward. Oh, and the Israeli and Nazi flag flutter side by side. We only pasted up a detail of the image as a street poster. Fly-posters work with their back to passersby and are therefore easy prey.
To see the blue Magen David paired with a swastika is provocative but it’s also a visual twosome that is appearing more often and more aptly with every passing day of IDF and settler violence. No one is trying to ‘un-remember’ the Hamas October 7th 2023 attack. But neither should we forget the subsequent years of displacement and slaughter.
Matthew Collings’ work is life-affirming: thoughtful, erudite, endlessly curious and sometimes caustically critical but always mindful that there’s a lot more to art than décor.