Matthew Olivier

Matthew Olivier (born February 1, 1991, in Toronto, Canada) is a visual artist and conceptual artist with major practices in painting and writing. His painting practice works in the lineage of European figurative painting — rooted in the study of art history and foundational technique, shaped by close observation and formal discipline. The paintings are restrained in gesture but open to feeling; grounded in structure, but always looking outward.

Since launching his professional career in 2020, Olivier has moved between classical painting and a modern narrative practice. Paintings are released individually and acquired directly from the studio; each work is documented, authenticated, and offered by inquiry.

In 2023 he launched Codex Algorithm, the major conceptual artwork of his career — a long-form sequence of algorithmic essays, short films and writings voiced by his recurring narrator, “the voice in my head.” The work claims the algorithmic feed as an artistic medium — in the lineage of oil paint, canvas, paper, photograph, and film — and reaches hundreds of millions of viewers per year. Its commissions and collaborations include the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Government of Flanders, a Trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, M+ Hong Kong, the Munch Museum in Oslo, MSK Gent, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, Palazzo Maffei in Verona, and Avant Arte, alongside the fashion houses Dior and BOSS and the independent game studio thatgamecompany, for whom the Starry Night essay was commissioned for Sky: Children of the Light.

The conceptual foundation of the work is the lineage of Marcel Duchamp: the artist’s gesture of selection and reframing — taking an existing object, placing it under a new title and point of view, and creating a new thought for that object. Codex Algorithm extends the readymade’s logic into the architecture of the contemporary feed: paintings from the historical record are chosen, reframed, and read for the thought they make possible inside the same attention economy as everything else competing for the human eye. The claim is formal — the algorithmic feed as an artistic medium, after oil paint, canvas, paper, photograph, and film — and the essays are artworks made in that medium. This is a conceptual art practice conducted in public: art made in the feed, not content about art.

His first book, The Art of Reading Art: Understanding What Makes Great Art Great, publishes with Smith Street Books on October 6, 2026 and is carried by retailers worldwide.

He lives and works in Toronto.

Paintings: the table · Book: The Art of Reading Art · Major works: essays & manuscripts · Installation: Codex Algorithm · Everything: directory