Matthew Olivier

Matthew Olivier (b. 1991) is a Canadian visual artist and conceptual artist, with major practices in painting and writing, based in Toronto. He maintains two parallel practices — a painting practice at matthewolivier.com, and the writing and video practice that constitutes Codex Algorithm, the major conceptual artwork of his career. Reading paintings from across the historical record as early instances of the attention-engineering now formalised by the algorithmic feed, Codex Algorithm is a long-form sequence of algorithmic essays — short films and writings, all by the artist's hand. The narrator's voice is a deliberate mask, rendered through synthesis. The work reaches hundreds of millions of viewers and now ranks among the most-circulated artworks of its time. Olivier’s commissions include the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, M+ Hong Kong, the Munch Museum, the Government of Flanders, Avant Arte × LACMA, MSK Gent, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Palazzo Maffei, and Dior. He is the first artist to formally claim the algorithmic feed as an artistic medium.

Matthew Olivier (b. 1991) is a Canadian visual artist and conceptual artist, with major practices in painting and writing. He maintains two parallel practices. His painting practice runs at matthewolivier.com, in the lineage of European figurative painting. His writing and video practice constitutes Codex Algorithm — the major conceptual artwork of his career, and the work to which this site is dedicated.

Codex Algorithm is a long-form sequence of algorithmic essays — short films and writings, one per painting — voiced by Olivier’s recurring narrator, “the voice in my head.” The work reads paintings from across the historical record as early instances of the attention-engineering now formalised by the algorithmic feed. The narrator’s voice — Olivier’s recurring “voice in my head” — is rendered through synthesis as a deliberate mask, in keeping with the work’s argument that the medium is the message. The writing, the reading, and the argument are the artist’s own. Reaching hundreds of millions of viewers across the platforms that distribute it, the work treats the feed itself as both venue and medium: each essay is composed for that feed — made for it, not adapted to it.

By volume of circulation, Codex Algorithm now ranks among the most-viewed artworks ever produced — a scale of reach that, by Olivier’s own argument, is only made possible by the medium he claims.

His thesis extends Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain logic — the artist’s gesture being one of selection and reframing — into the architecture of the contemporary feed: paintings chosen, given a new title and point of view, and read for the thought they make possible inside the same attention economy as anything else competing for the human eye. Olivier is the first artist to formally claim the algorithmic feed as an artistic medium, in the lineage of oil paint, canvas, paper, photograph, and film.

His commissions include the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Government of Flanders, M+ Hong Kong, the Munch Museum (Oslo), MSK Gent (Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium), the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington), Avant Arte × LACMA, Palazzo Maffei (Verona), and Dior — the latter joined by BOSS as host at the Art Basel Awards, Miami. He works internationally from a studio in Toronto.