"The thing about Weir’s work is that it makes your head hurt, exquisitely. There’s so much to untangle that, like Ariadne, you risk getting lost. There are no straight lines to follow — everything starts to curve and twist until you lose your mental co-ordinates. The fact that it appears so thematically consistent can start to seem like a trick to lure you into a false sense of security .... The work looks like it’s all about one thing, but then it seems to be alluding to another and another and another. Are we actually talking about race and oppression, or is that just a metaphor for something else? Would it be acceptable to use slavery as a metaphor? And if it’s unacceptable, who should we hold to account? Mathew Weir, ourselves (for even entertaining the idea, however briefly) or the fact that language and signification are so slippery and inhuman that they don’t differentiate between the serious and the non-serious, the meaningful and the meaningless, one Uncle Tom and another?"

"More than anything it's the surfaces of Weir's paintings, intricately alive with his vermicular brushwork, that contribute to this sense that the paintings are at once edible and corrupt, alluring and at the same time viscerally repulsive they hover, one might say, in that truly perplexing state between beauty and decay …Whatever the stereotypical, sentimental or comic iconography that Weir laboriously reproduces – alongside the radicalized grotesques and creepy renditions of girlish innocence are ribald, antic examples of the Dance of Death – it is this crepitant texture that both attracts and repels."

"The paintings are hyper-real, even though their technique is one of complete abstraction, for Weir’s handling is laborious and evokes an unearthly stillness; and appearance reminiscent of the surface of rippling water. Weir is concerned with context and ‘how interpretations and meanings shift and/or change through time’. In his work, ‘the focus of interpretation moves between violence and exploitation, cruelty and tenderness, death and innocence’ – often all within the same painting."

"What does Weir want us to think when we look at this image? What does he want us to feel? Implicated, I suspect, is one answer, and responsible is another. Our planet – with its history, its hum of desire, its magnetic fields of attraction and repulsion – is a hard place to inhabit. What makes this possible are sympathy, self-reflectiveness and the flourishing, foundering stuff of beauty. This is what Weir’s paintings offer us. This is their strange fruit."