Britain’s Matthew Stone is an artist and shaman, begins his biography — one that grows increasingly complex in his artistic vision of the human condition. His activities as photographer, sculptor, performance artist, curator, writer, Optimist and cultural provocateur recently placed him at the top of The Sunday Times ‘Power Players Under 30’ list.

After Graduating from Camberwell Art School in 2004, with a first-class degree in Painting, Stone spearheaded South London’s !WOWOW! art collective, organizing guerrilla art exhibitions and throwing London’s most notorious and decadent squat parties. Dazed and Confused magazine featured the collective, claiming the children of !WOWOW! “would live on in legend for years to come.” and i-D Magazine described Matthew, saying “He gave birth to a happening, and all of a sudden, in his wake, London was exciting again.”  In 2008 — !WOWOW! took over Tate Britain — attracting a record 4,000 people, who came to witness one of his performances.

Stone’s whole being is geared toward a life lived as art. His personalised definition of Optimism as a method for avant-garde thought and art practice, inverts the nihilistic cultural dialogues of the late twentieth century to create a necessary space for vibrant new ways of being. Saatchi Online said that Stone’s work “definitely points to the art of tomorrow, I think, an immaterial quality equal parts idealist belief and cynicism, working as an alternative, very palpable reality running along the rest of society.” Esteemed curator and ex-head of the Royal Academy; Norman Rosenthal said simply “he has invented a new ‘ism’—Optimism.”

Stone has provided the soundtrack to each of close friend, designer Gareth Pugh’s fashion shows and films, and was a resident DJ at London’s legendary nightclub Boombox.

The mounds of nakes bodies that comprise Matthew Stone’s ‘Body Language’ paintings are an artistic statement about true reality in our politically and religiously polarized worlds. Ideologies argue that we humans and our environment exist in a series of simple paths: light/dark, good/evil, I/Other, good/bad.

The Optimist shaman Matthew Stone rejects these binary choices as overly simplistic and inaccurate. These seemingly conflicting realities co-exist in the universe and in ourselves.

Matthew Stone’s ‘Cosmic Flesh’ paintings are currently showing in October 2014 at the Union Gallery, 94 Teesdale Street. Details are on Stone’s Blog: Optimism As Cultural Rebellion. The University of the Arts London interviewed Matthew Stone in 2012.