The Painter - Paul Screach

An Infinite Number of Monkeys

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At the heart of my work lies a fundamental tension between chaos and design, accident and intention. The metaphor of “an infinite number of monkeys typing for eternity”—eventually reproducing the complete works of Shakespeare—has long been used to illustrate the power of randomness to yield order. But I find this notion both comical and slightly unsettling. It reduces creation to accident, meaning to coincidence, and art to mere probability.

Through my practice, I challenge this absurdity. If the universe, life and consciousness are nothing more than statistical inevitabilities, then what room is left for purpose? For meaning?

view of work in Paul's Studio

My work resists the cold comfort of that logic. As each new painting emerges and a concept takes shape I push back on the notion that beauty is a byproduct of chaos. I explore the conflict between the belief in a deliberate Creator and the nihilism embedded in the idea that, given enough time and randomness, anything—even the profound—will eventually emerge. The “infinite monkeys” allegory may be clever, but it trivialises the sublime. It mistakes noise for music. In contrast, I am reaching for something sacred—intelligence behind intention, spirit behind matter, design behind complexity. I do not reject science or probability; on the contrary, I have had a fascination since childhood, but I am increasingly intrigued by the source of its poetry.

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The Ceramic Artist - Sav Mattyasovszky

Pet.

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To treat, to stroke, to keep, to have, to engage, to pet. Souvenirs, hidden gestures and fragile links create a physical certainty of memories. Found objects and digital data cast into bronze and ceramic tablets serve as depictions of past obsessions. To just remember a feeling is too intangible and loose. I seem to always chase a permanence that something was real, that we felt it, or that it happened at all.

Changing scales and materials of jewellery motifs alter the keepsake-ness of the object. Blowing the scale of the original escalates the emotion it represents; it may become easier to see but burdens you with its weight. A ceramic chain is joined by a bronze link, the keystone of the locket, signifying a redundant reinforcement, a desperate attempt to hold itself together. Toying with the miniature and the gigantic alters their metaphors of containment-the miniature as contained, the gigantic as container. (1)

(1) Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 71

Artist Statement

Sav Mattyasovszky is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Sav primarily works with ceramics, creating commemorative objects to set memories in a physical realm. She explores the blur of coming of age and the uncertainty of memory. Setting moments in stone, these objects become a collection of mortality, and an obsession with truth. She completed her Master of Visual Arts from AUT in 2023 and currently works there in the Art & Design Wet Lab.