NERVOUS SYSTEMS
Digital painting over pen and pencil 2025–2026
NERVOUS SYSTEMS
Digital painting over pen and pencil 2025–2026
SHADOW NETWORK
Digital painting over original pen-and-pencil drawings, 2025–2026
Ryan Matta's recent works combine original pen-and-pencil drawing with digital painting, building dense visual fields in which figures coexist with diagrams, symbols, scratches and repeated marks. The distinction between character and environment frequently collapses: bodies become structures, lines become spaces, and incidental marks accumulate into systems. Working between analog drawing and digital painting, Matta retains the immediacy and instability of the original sketch while using the digital surface as a space for revision, accumulation and interruption.
SYSTEM CIRCUITS
Digital painting over original pen-and-pencil drawings, 2025–2026
System Circuits brings together works organized around diagrams, grids, trajectories and recurring geometric forms. Human and invented figures inhabit visual systems that suggest circuitry, maps, machines and information networks. Hand-drawn marks collide with digital color and structure, creating images poised somewhere between diagram and psychological landscape.
PSYCHO DOODLES VOL. 1
Digital painting over original pen-and-pencil drawings, 2021-2022
The early Psychodoodles established a cast of anxious, comic and occasionally grotesque figures emerging from spontaneous drawing. Beginning without predetermined narratives, these works develop through improvisation—characters, accidents and stray marks suggesting relationships and situations as the image takes shape.
PARASITES
Digital painting over original pen-and-pencil drawings, 2025-2026
Parasites gathers a collection of strange organisms, anxious figures and invented creatures that inhabit—and occasionally overtake—their surroundings. Emerging through spontaneous drawing rather than predetermined narratives, the figures mutate as the images develop, blurring distinctions between character, creature and environment. Humor and menace coexist in a world governed by appetite, intrusion and uneasy symbiosis.
Ryan J. Matta is a painter and illustrator whose work he calls Psychodoodles—a spontaneous fusion of chaos, humor, and intuition. Each piece begins as a raw scribble on a scrap of paper, often drawn absentmindedly while multitasking. These impulsive sketches are later transformed on an iPad, where Matta paints over them while preserving the immediacy of the original line.
His process values imperfection and instinct over control, creating images that feel alive—charged with tension, absurdity, and unexpected emotion. The result is a body of work that blurs the boundary between accident and intention, reflecting the unruly rhythm of modern life with wit and visual intensity.