It might not be evident, but Prolog also offers arrays out of the box. A Prolog compound has a functor and a number of arguments. This means we could represent an array such as:
[[1,2],[3,4]]
Replacing the Prolog lists by the following Prolog compounds:
matrice(vector(1,2), vector(3,4))
The advantage would be faster element access from an integer index. Can this representation be used to realize a matrix multiplication?
There is yet another approach, as implemented in R (the statistical environment). The dimensions of the array and the values are kept separately. So your square could also be represented as:
array(dims(2, 2), v(1,2,3,4))
This approach has some (questionable) benefits and drawbacks. You can start reading here, if you are at all interested: https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/base/html/dim.html
To your question, yes, you can implement matrix multiplication, regardless on how you decide to represent the matrix. It would be interesting to see how the two approaches (array of arrays vs. one array and calculating indexes from the dimensions) compare in terms of efficiency.
What algorithm do you want to use for the matrix multiplication? Is it any of the ones described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_multiplication_algorithm?
EDIT: do you want to allow the client code to be able to provide the product and sum operations? Do you want to allow specialization of the values? For example, if you want to use matrix multiplication for finding the transitive closure of a graph, you could represent the boolean square matrix as an unbounded integer. This will make the matrix itself at least quite small.
