Mathijs Hunfeld: Seductions of the Self-Made Surface

Mathijs Hunfeld is a London-based interdisciplinary artist whose work operates at the uneasy intersection between desire and critique. Through sculpture, object-based installation, and contextual interventions, Hunfeld examines the seductive pull of consumer aesthetics, confronting the viewer with hyper-designed artifacts that both glorify and destabilize the tropes of late capitalist identity. His works mimic the sheen and polish of luxury commodities, yet crackle with irony, self-awareness, and an undercurrent of existential fatigue.

At the heart of Hunfeld’s practice lies a performative engagement with branding, emotional dependency, and aspirational surfaces. Sampling from the aesthetics of product design, advertising, and pop culture, he constructs hybrid objects that are at once collectible, absurd, and tragic. In doing so, he not only exposes the fetishisation of consumer forms but also implicates the viewer within the economy of attention, desire, and replication.

Hunfeld’s works are highly choreographed - constructed with precision and semiotic density - yet they remain unstable, caught between celebration and critique. Drawing from his background in both fine art and product design, he creates sculptural systems where the boundaries between function, fetish, and fiction dissolve. This ambiguity becomes the critical site of his work: a space where fantasy is not merely visual, but structural; where identity is not performed but manufactured.

Often referencing themes of infantilisation, affective addiction, and the failure of sincerity, Hunfeld’s sculptures do not merely parody consumer forms - they mourn them, elevating their collapse into ritual. His objects resist simple legibility, instead lingering in the double bind of attraction and discomfort, recognition and alienation.

BABY FACE IT, 2024

A row of pacifiers cast in chocolate and acrylic - glossy, seductive, and disturbingly edible - comprises BABY FACE IT, a series that unpacks the infantilisation of adult desire in late capitalist spectacle. The pacifier, a symbol of comfort and control, becomes here a luxury object stripped of its innocence, recast as a polished accessory of emotional performance.

Each piece in the series functions simultaneously as product and provocation. Through its materiality - chocolate as fleeting pleasure, acrylic as industrial permanence - Hunfeld creates a tension between sweetness and suffocation. The works are visually playful but conceptually stark: they evoke a cultural condition where pleasure is prescribed, where dependency masquerades as autonomy, and where the pursuit of self-expression is increasingly mediated by symbols of emotional suppression.

This is not nostalgia but satire: a sharp critique of the ways in which adult identity is infantilised through media tropes, self-branding, and digital rituals of affirmation. BABY FACE IT presents dependency not as weakness, but as a constructed mode of being - marketable, consumable, and disturbingly familiar.

S/N: 782C6-F935G-A & S/N: 78C26-F935G-B, 2024

Cast in bronze, glass, and mild steel, these twin figurines emerge as enigmatic relics from an imagined entertainment-industrial complex. S/N: 782C6-F935G-A and S/N: 78C26-F935G-B are not characters but archetypes of circulation fatigue - objects that parody the visual economies of collectibles while resisting the logic of infinite exchange.

Their serial numbers replace names; their identities are numerical, not emotional. They recall action figures, trophies, avatars - but deliberately break the fourth wall of cuteness and affect. Suspended between exhibition and extinction, the figures critique the disposability of icons in the marketplace of attention. They are designed to last, but for what? Their robust materials contradict their performative ephemerality, suggesting a post-ironic inertia where movement has ceased but spectacle continues.

The mirrored structure of the pair invokes a relationship that cannot stand alone - each needs the other to signify, yet neither achieves coherence. This symbiosis is parasitic rather than mutual, mirroring the relational dependency between consumer and product. Their “appearance-only” identity becomes a meditation on branding as existential trap, and the emptiness that follows when form exhausts function.

Through S/N: 782C6-F935G-A and S/N: 78C26-F935G-B, Hunfeld stages a haunting satire of cultural obsolescence—where desire is manufactured, icons are consumed, and objects outlive their meaning. In this terminal loop of production and disillusionment, the figurines float in a vacuum of curated nothingness.

Images: ©Mathijs Hunfeld, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: MIAO