Manuel Mathieu

Manuel Mathieu (b. 1986, Port-au-Prince, Haiti)

Manuel Mathieu is a multidisciplinary artist, working with painting, drawing, ceramics, and installation. His work investigates themes of historical violence, erasure and cultural approaches to physicality, nature, and spiritual legacy. Mathieu’s interests are partially informed by his upbringing in Haiti, and his experience emigrating to Montréal at the age of 19. Freely operating in between and borrowing from numerous historical influences and traditions, Mathieu aims to find meaning through a spiritual or asemic mode of apparition. 

Mathieu has developed a distinctive abstract visual language, used to create phenomenological encounters that confront our didactic traditions. Amorphous forms vacillate and dissolve into one another, creating boundless landscapes traversable through desire. Through his quest for meaning, transparency and openness he undertakes a process of discovering his work, as opposed to creating it; by doing so the work holds its autonomy and can be assimilated into a space of collective consciousness. The vibrational effect of his work elicits physical and emotional frequencies that offer alternative methods for navigating the world. 

Recent solo exhibitions include: World Discovered Under Other Skies, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami; The End of Figuration, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill; Rising from the Ashes, K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai; Keeping things whole, Pilar Corrias, London; Manuel Mathieu, Longlati Foundation, Shanghai; Survivance, Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal; World Discovered Under Other Skies, The Power Plant, Toronto, and 49/50, Fig 2, Institute of Contemporary Art, London. Selected group exhibitions include: SOFT POWER, Das Minsk Kunsthaus, Potsdam; SHIFT: Ecologies of Fashion, Form and Textile, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver; RIOPELLE: CROSSROADS IN TIME, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and Oh telephone, oracle noir, Le Magasin CNAC, Grenoble.