ESSAY: MATHEW ZEFELDT: PLAY-TO-PAINT IN LOS SANTOS (PART ONE OF TWO)
Mathew Zefeldt’s paintings arise from an unusual kind of studio: the open world of Grand Theft Auto V. The artist uses the fictional state of San Andreas as a mobile image-bank, roaming the environment with an avatar modelled on himself and waiting for “poetic moments” to appear: spectacular crashes, fighter jets banking over freeways, a deer caught in late sunlight, a car frozen mid-plunge over a cliff. These events are captured as screenshots and later translated into large-scale paintings in a process that resembles a form of digital sketching.
The imagery is not scraped from marketing stills or cutscenes. Every situation is generated by Zefeldt through play: by choosing the viewpoint, triggering explosions, selecting cars and outfits, or simply lingering in front of a view. His process is straightforwardly digital-sourced and analogue-executed (“A single image is selected and repeatedly painted in a grid on a canvas, sometimes twice and sometimes as much as 25 times”, he explains). Within this arrangement, the avatar functions as a surrogate eye and body. The painter’s choices (where to drive, whom to collide with, which street to occupy at dusk) feed directly into the resulting images. Zefeldt’s GTA paintings are therefore not generic representations of “gaming culture” but records of one person’s scripted and unscripted encounters in Los Santos. The works occupy an uneasy zone between self-portrait, autofiction, travel painting and fan fiction, filtered through the most successful commercial entertainment product of all time.
Zefeldt has described himself, now almost canonically, as “a contemporary plein-air painter who sets up my easel at the edge of a screen.” The formula captures the anachronism, paradoxes and internal logic of his practice. Where nineteenth-century painters carried easels into fields, quarries and train stations to record the effects of industrial modernity, he enters a virtual city and treats its algorithmic light, weather and architecture as a legitimate subject for painting. There is a historical irony here. En plein-air painting was controversial in its own time because it privileged direct observation of contingent conditions, for instance fugitive light or unstable weather, over the romanticized constructions of the studio. Zefeldt, by contrast, treats a hyper-idealised, commercially designed environment as his outdoors. His “direct observation” is always already mediated by Rockstar Games’ asset libraries, art direction, engine idiosyncrasies and design constraints. The landscape has been optimised for cinematic vistas and gameplay loops before he ever arrives with his virtual easel. This inversion is part of the work’s charge: it quietly asks whether “nature” and “experience” now increasingly appear first as pre-authored simulations...