Stepping into the darkened warehouse, the fresh aroma of shaved timber, resins and paint hit me immediately – nestled into an unsuspecting, near hidden laneway somewhere in North Melbourne, there is no doubt that it was a place of work; the scents prove as much.

We walked to the back of the warehouse, Adnate passed me a beer, and we headed into his space. There’s numerous tags around the studio, many from the AWOL crew as well as his talent laden painting partner of almost ten years, Slicer. There were marks from Does, DMV and other transient visitors – its an intimate space, a place to imagine, do the regular email bane, and to store the ephemera of his trade. However, as I’m looking around he also tells me that he did most of his recent painting out back, where there’s a little more room to move.

Yet the thing that most draw my eye, leaning up against one side of the room, was a massive stack of canvases which held the majority of work for his upcoming show at RTIST Gallery – “Lost Culture.”

Having spent time living in Barcelona and Germany (where he also held his last solo show, Point Of View), and with an extensive amount of travel to various countries under his belt, Adnates perspective and work has always held a worldly view. Through the past years his work has veered away from the graffiti infused letterforms that he started out painting, and moved into the world of portraiture. Though much of this direction has been evident in some of his past shows, as I started looking through the pieces that make up Lost Culture, I began to feel as if he has stepped, no, leaped, beyond the threshold of his previous work.

Adnates new works are salubrious in nature, infused with distinct and defined homage to Persian, Tibetan and Indigenous Australian cultures. One of the first pieces I saw, a portrait of a young Persian woman, grabbed me immediately.

“The Persian culture was renowned for its beautiful, but very strong, and very powerful, women,” he remarked, when he noted my intent gaze, (and possibly in response to my muttering a range of impressed expletives) “I really wanted to represent those powerful women in this show as well as I could.”

These visages of individuals throughout his pieces are often veiled, portioned and hidden – and within the works are personalised marks, calligraphy, tagging and snippets of writing from both Persian or Tibetan texts. “The scripts on the Persian pieces are from a old poem that I had translated,” he said, following my gaze across the script.

“It’s all about beauty, and the loss of beauty.”

His own lettering, a stylised form fifteen years in the making, fades, bleeds and emerges back and forth throughout each piece, adjoining each portraits narrative with an intimacy that never overwhelms; a natural symbiotic balancing act. Adnates tags are an integral part of each of his works, which is evident within the pieces, and he decries any opinion as to their lesser worth as a “real” art form.

“When I teach, I have students that just work all session and smash out tags,” he remarked whilst we discussing them. “Sometimes other teachers will walk past and go ‘oh, can’t they do something a litte more artistic?’ – and I mean, just the other day I just got paid money to do tags at a corporate event! This kid can sit and do tags if he wants, okay? Let him do tags!”

As with his work up upon the walls of various metropolitan locales, the individuals in his works for Lost Culture speak their stories not through gestures or scenarios, but via the most powerfully subtle feature of the human body – the eyes. By focusing intently on the gaze and messages that the eyes can convey, each portrait relays a story; their lustre and sheen glistening with the power of cultures both ancient and enigmatic.

After going on about the eyes probably way more times than I realised, and how they felt like the centre piece of each work, he explained how important it was for him to get them right. “That’s kind of the idea,” he enthused. “I really focus on the eyes in particular and spend a lot of time getting them perfect. Fifty percent of my time on every painting is spent on the eyes. Then the rest of the piece … it becomes almost like a juxtaposition and contrasting texture – it makes the focus of the eyes more intense.”

All things aside, these new works from Adnate are just an extension of his true love of graffiti, they are as close a representation of the way in which he works on the walls of the city as can be made possible within the confines of a gallery.

Every mark, texture and feature of the portraits emanates from within a spraycan, every letterforms from the ink of a pen. His only brushes are the hundreds of caps he’s gone through in the process of putting together the show, or the thinly encased tip of a gloved finger. The details are startling, each image possessing the rawness of the street, and his refined aerosol techniques resemble the blessings of a traditional oil painting, retaining an edged texture that no airbrush can render.

It’s been a few years since I first got to know Adnate, back at a time when I didn’t really know where this site was going, or what I wanted it to become. He was an artist whose work stood out at the fore, and he was one of many whose work directly influenced my want to find out as much as I could about the artists working here in Australia. Over this time, he has also become a mate; someone whom I both respect and admire. Unbeknownst to him, his encouragement and kind words of support, like those of many of the people around me, have always spurred me on. It’s not lost on the majority of those of us who love art that successful artists are also great and humble people, who not only put their passion into their own work, but who also advocate the passions of others; those who put as much back out into the world as they themselves gain.

From his work out on the streets, to his teaching sessions, his drive and sheer output, and, importantly, his desire to expose others to the beauty of different cultures via his art, are all noble endeavours. Although he would probably shrug it off, as humble as he is, he is a definite leader amongst modern Australian artists traversing new realms of artistic expression.

Experimentation, boundary breaking, humility – humanity – and, of course, talent, are all elements that separate a great artist from someone who just paints – Matt Adnate is one such person, and Lost Culture is a show that will easily put proof to that claim.

And because we always like giving you just that little bit extra, here’s some extra photos of Adnates studio, to a glimpse inside and to get a little feel for where he works …

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Check out more info on Lost Culture, Matt Adnates website, RTIST Gallery and the AWOL crew for more info.