The Miaz Brothers (b. 1965/1968) present a radical new take on portraiture. The Italian sibling duo create large-format canvases using spray paint as it has never been used before. The “Antimatter Series”, as their body of work is known, incorporates a diverse and refreshing range of subjects. It includes portraits of their friends, their dear departed (“Ghosts”), philosophers, fashionable female Japanese adolescents (“Kawaii”), and figures from the era of the English Restoration (“Masters”).

While they employ aerosol paints, the Miaz Brothers have never been street artists nor are they ever likely to start. “We use it to represent the fact that we are composed of infinite particles in continuous evolution,” they say, “which change in tandem with the complex reality that surrounds us.” The spray paint produces the blurred effect that defines the duo’s work: “dematerialising the lines, we gain a substantial indetermination of the picture. This skips any immediate reaction and provokes the viewer to use mnemonic associations instead for their own personal visual information encoding.”

The Miaz Brothers work focus on ethereal portraits. Rendering each canvas with layers of aerosol paint, the artists explore the space between one’s perception of the self and that which is intangible. Their paintings are not representations, but are rather studies in perception, as the viewer’s interaction with the work is the foundation of their concept. The artists encourage the observer “to interact with the image and to [filter] it through the process of identification – to achieve something not fixed and limited but boundless and personal”.

Classical portraiture, referenced within the aesthetic of the figures portrayed in their “Masters” series of paintings, was meant to immortalize or at the least convey a specific meaning for that individual and their status in the world, either literally or figuratively. The Miaz Brothers choose to confront this sense of certainty, in which the viewer strives to find signs and symbols of what constitutes the subject, by exploring the ephemeral nature of the individual. They diffuse that moment of recognition and rather suggest the impossibilities of capturing true identity, proposing the perception of the self to be fluid and infinite. Their paintings sit in the space between what is is known and unknown – dwelling on what is not seen and not said.