Books

BEYOND IMAGE: PARAMONTAGES, 2022–24

Matthew da Silva brings poetry, photography and digital construction together in a new two-volume art book.

The project has an unusual chronology. Many of the poems were written years before the visual works, beginning around 2007, and were later brought into the paramontages. Rather than functioning as captions or explanations, the poems enter the visual field and alter the way the photographs are encountered.

"The poems precede the visual works, yet they are not preserved unchanged when they reappear. Their encounter with photography and digital construction produces a new object and a new reading situation," says Giselle Aali in the image volume.

The publication consists of two autonomous but interconnected volumes. The image volume presents the paramontages, while the accompanying text moves through autobiography, artistic method, cultural history, institutional reflection and criticism. Neither book simply explains the other; meaning develops through the movement between reading and looking.

The term "paramontage" was coined by Canberra poet Andrew Adair, an old school friend of Matthew da Silva, after da Silva posted a question on Facebook asking what to call the works. Adair's suggestion gave a name to a body of digital compositions begun in 2022, combining photography, poetry and digital construction.

Da Silva's visual process combines archival and newly made photographs with digital construction. Some images use a technique in which one digital camera photographs a scene through the viewfinder of another, creating a softened image without digitally manufactured blur.

Aali's Precedent Research Note places the work within a wider history of relationships between image and language, considering Tang and Song traditions of poetry and painting, Art & Language, Colin McCahon, Sophie Calle and W. G. Sebald. These are presented as critical frameworks rather than claims of direct influence.

Artist/author: Matthew da Silva
Research and curation: Giselle Aali, Michelle Andringa
Book design: Bettina Kaiser
Printing: Pegasus Media and Logistics
Price: $50 two-volume set
Available from October 2026
Contact: esag.sydney@gmail.com
Beyond Image: Paramontages 2022–24 is a production of the Eastern Suburbs Art Group.