An intimate exchange on gold, belief and the shifting place of the human in a virtual age.
BL: When I entered your studio, I initially thought this work wasn’t a flat painting at all, but a three-dimensional metal object.
MA: I’m glad you saw it that way. I’ve been working on this painting for a very long time—about sixteen years in total—and illusion was something I wanted to explore. I’m not particularly interested in trompe l’oeil as trickery, but I do like illusion. Reality feels increasingly unfamiliar as virtual reality becomes more dominant in our lives, and I wanted to capture that.
I wanted to make a kind of modern altarpiece about belief and faith. So yes, I’m pleased it looked like an object to you. And I also wanted it to look like gold—that was part of the project. Did the gold element work for you?
BL: Yes, absolutely. It even made me think of Versailles, of the symbol of Louis XIV, the Sun King.
MA: That’s interesting, because that’s actually where the idea first began—not Rembrandt, as I sometimes say, but Louis XIV. When I was about nine, I found a book about him on my parents’ bookshelf. Inside the cover was an engraving of him as the Sun King. I was shocked by how miserable he looked—having everything yet looking utterly unhappy. That was the first seed of this painting.
Years later, when I saw Rembrandt’s Jacob Wrestling the Angel, the two ideas joined together. But the very first impulse was that childhood encounter. And yes, I would love to show the painting at Versailles—though my gold might struggle to compete with theirs!
BL: For the French king, the sun was a symbol of justice—because its light touches everyone equally.
MA: My sun comes from a slightly different place. It’s more about the idea that human beings might imagine themselves as the centre of the universe, rather than God. The central face in the painting is actually based on a photograph of me as a child—around eighteen months old, looking suitably perplexed.
When we’re young, we believe we’re at the centre of our world. Growing up is the slow realisation that we aren’t. There’s a parallel to the Fall: after the Fall, humanity had to live in a different, more difficult world. Secular adulthood is similar—we awaken to the complexities of the world and our place in it.
So for me, the sun here is less about justice and more about that moment when we are “abandoned” to ourselves within an ever more complex—and increasingly virtual—world. And by extension, perhaps a fear that we may eventually end up in a world where humans are no longer the centre of anything. I wanted the painting to express and embrace that.
BL: And the frame? Did the idea come from the museum’s Italian paintings?
MA: I’ve always been interested in frames. I actually don’t believe that what contemporary artists make becomes art until it enters the canon—which takes time. So the frame is a kind of shortcut, a slightly cheeky gesture.
There’s also a bit of Stanley Kubrick about it. Where the painting hangs now, it looks as if it’s been “beamed in”—as if someone typed coordinates for a golden age, and it materialised in the Dutch Golden Age. I love that juxtaposition.
The frame itself refers to a temple, so it nods to religious altarpieces. And there’s a technical role too: painting the illusion of gold is extremely difficult. I wanted the gold to feel heavenly—pure and intensely yellow. The grey of the frame lifts the gold and makes it appear more luminous.
Because the painting is round, there were all sorts of problems with presentation. A round frame didn’t work. So the architectural frame developed from practicalities, which I think is a good thing. It’s based on a Greek temple. In temples, golden objects at the back would be illuminated when sunlight entered from the front. That idea was very appealing.
BL: In Italy it would be called an aedicula—like the entrance to a temple or church.
MA: That’s fascinating.
BL: And it mirrors how Renaissance façades and altarpieces echo one another in architecture.
MA: Exactly. In fact, I once imagined showing this work at Tate Britain—the building’s façade is similar to this frame. Displaying the frame inside the building would create an interesting doubling.
BL: There’s also a long tradition of painting gold without using real gold. Van Eyck, for example.
MA: Van Eyck has been crucial for me. What he created were illusions. The gold in his paintings is unbelievable—the crown in the Mystic Lamb, for example. I studied those works for years but never quite managed to unlock their secrets.
I realised that illusion requires context: if you cut out one of Van Eyck’s painted crowns and pinned it to a wall, it probably wouldn’t look like gold. It’s the surrounding context that completes the illusion. That was an important revelation for me.
I also studied ancient gold in the British Museum—the buttery, very yellow purity of it. I tried to capture that. Early on, around 2002, I showed a painting called Eden Grown Old that moved towards that quality. Then in 2005 I showed the Victory Series, which was much more ethereal—almost just the aura of gold. But that wasn’t enough.
Eventually I realised I wanted the absolute illusion of gold. And strangely, looking back, I think I equated absolute illusion with absolute faith.
I also thought a lot about Baroque ceilings—Correggio in Parma, for example. They created virtual worlds overhead. That sense of wonder was something I wanted to achieve: a virtual space that hovers between illusion and reality. One moment it looks real, the next moment it collapses. That fluctuation mirrors belief itself; you can’t hold onto it constantly.
BL: Yes, that’s central to Baroque ceilings—Pozzo’s at Sant’Ignazio, for example, only works from one precise spot.
MA: Exactly. And that fluctuation—success and failure—is essential to this painting. I even wrote in my proposal that the work is successful one moment and unsuccessful the next. I hesitated to admit that, but it’s the truth. It’s part of the work.
As a child I was captivated by The Man with the Golden Helmet, though now it’s considered to be by a follower of Rembrandt, not Rembrandt himself.
BL: Yes, it’s not considered an autograph Rembrandt anymore.
MA: Still, to a young artist it was extraordinary. That illusion of gold was formative for me. So it’s rather nice that it hangs here too.
BL: It was an important painting in Germany for a long time, even though its attribution was incorrect.
MA: And of course seeing your Jacob Wrestling the Angel for the first time was unforgettable. I was almost shocked by it. I knew Gauguin’s version, but I had either forgotten the Rembrandt or never seen it properly. The idea of wrestling with an angel—and with meaning—felt so modern. We tend to think only we wrestle with meaning in our era, but of course people have always done so.
BL: Yes, it’s possible.
MA: Rembrandt’s many self-portraits also speak to that wrestling. His gaze is incredibly intense. Even if he was pragmatic, which I know he was, you can’t paint yourself again and again without confronting the passing of time, and the shock of seeing oneself change.
BL: Much more pragmatic than the romantic myth suggests, certainly.
MA: In any case, it’s been a great honour to show my self-portrait adjacent to Jacob Wrestling the Angel. For me, both works are about identity—self-identity or identity more broadly.
It’s quite unfashionable for contemporary artists to speak about emotion. But that’s the reality of this work.
BL: And like the Dutch painters, you’re working for the art market—though at your own pace.
MA: At a very slow pace, yes—the art market would probably prefer I produced more.