Idols Lovers Mothers Friends: Inside Rene Matić’s deeply personal new show

There are two photographs of James Baldwin’s Another Country – a novel about relationships and love in a racialised world – in Rene Matić’s solo show Idols Lovers Mothers Friends at Arcadia Missa. In one, a first-edition copy of the book is placed on a crumpled, slept-in bed and in the other, a photograph of one of Matić’s favourite excerpts from the book. They were drawn to the moment when the Black partner declares, “You’ll be kissing a long time, my friend, before you kiss any of this away”. To Matić, Baldwin captured this almost uncapturable feeling they’ve been thinking about for the last several years, about the love they share with white people. “It’s this idea of thinking we would be able to kiss away all of the racism, and I felt that so deep within me because of my romantic relationships with white people and knowing that the differences between us will always be present, and it’s kind of impossible, sadly, to kiss it away. There are not enough kisses in the world. Or maybe there is, and we’re just not kissing enough,” Matić explains over a video call. 

I caught Matić a few days after it was announced that they were nominated for the Turner Prize, making them the youngest nominee since the prize was established in 1984. The show’s opening was abuzz with friends and loved ones showering the artist with due praise, floral arrangements and affection. You could spot some of Matić’s subjects (their Idols, Lovers, Mothers, Friends, as the title suggests) in the gallery, posing in front of their photograph or by the artist’s side. The black and white photographs on show are steeped in quotidian intimacy: the artist reaching out to touch a loved one’s face, a former partner lying in bed with their hair blending into a shaggy blanket, a friend performing at a venue in South London, their mother smoking a cigarette. 

This air-tight intimacy, Matić’s lens of love, as it were, has been an aspect that the artist continually works through in their practice. In this show, they are attentive to how their proximity to whiteness, specifically being raised by a white mother, informs their very being and how they love. “I started talking about love so much in my work because of a book by Kathleen Collins called Whatever Happened to Interracial Love. I previously thought about my body as something that has whiteness and Blackness completely at war with one another inside one another,“ Matić explains, referencing how this feeling may be attributed to the complex relationship their parents share. “But after reading this work, I realised that this body I wander around in began because of love and I started to relax a little bit. The anger is still there, but the way I navigate it is a bit softer. There’s such a deep sadness to knowing that when you’re in love in an interracial relationship, there’s this huge space between both of you that almost never goes away, and I’ve struggled deeply with that, and I know that my partners have as well.” 

“There’s sadness to those images because in a way they reflect my search for identity and what that means to me as someone brought up in a predominantly white family” – Rene Matić

Navigating the complex relationships with the white figures who have shaped, loved, nurtured and occasionally challenged the artist is the driving force behind the photographs in the show and its euphonic title. “The name of the show came from the idea of a book I want to write where each word ‘Idols’, ‘Lovers’, ‘Mothers’, ‘Friends’ would be a chapter,” Matić says. “These words are also shape-shifting positions that reflect how Blackness and whiteness move through and against each other. It looks at the entanglement of intimacy, power, and care. It follows from my older work, which has been about how interracial relationships or relationships in general navigate that balance between love and pain.” 

Thinking about whiteness was also present in the image-making process, the artist reflects, speaking to how the works on display mark the first time they worked in a dark room and developed their own prints. “It was such an amazing moment to learn a new skill, but it was also a reminder of how the camera is a technology built to suit an inherently colonial, racist premise. Working in the darkroom, you really get to see the problematics of this technology you’re using because blackness in the darkroom is really a shadow of whiteness. To bring out the details of Black skin or even darkness in an image to show up, you have to work out the relationship with whiteness perfectly,” Matić explains, revealing how the photographs of Black bodies in the show took them much longer to make as something always had to be comprised in the process. “The chemicals and the process of making images in the dark room reminded me of how I, as a Black person with a white mother as my primary caregiver, was similarly designed with whiteness in mind,” the artist shares. “This whiteness shapes the love I seek and is complicated. It may never be able to hold all of me, so I felt like using this chemical process to create images of that love.” 

While there are only some glimpses of Matić’s physical form interspersed in the show, every image is a reflection of the artist. The images of Blackness, and to some extent themselves, may not be overtly apparent to the viewer but surface in the photographs of objects such as a Nina Simone record or the figures of St Martin De Porres. “Those images are almost like self-portraits. They reflect a solitary practice of nurturing that part of myself that reads James Baldwin or listens to Nina Simone. There’s sadness to those images because in a way they reflect my search for identity and what that means to me as someone brought up in a predominantly white family.” 

Rene Matić’s Idols Lovers Mothers Friends is showing at Arcadia Missa until 3 June, 2025.