{"id":682,"date":"2021-05-14T08:20:55","date_gmt":"2021-05-14T00:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=682"},"modified":"2021-05-13T11:27:42","modified_gmt":"2021-05-13T03:27:42","slug":"manuel-mathieus-paintings-of-trauma-and-desire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/auction\/manuel-mathieus-paintings-of-trauma-and-desire\/","title":{"rendered":"MANUEL MATHIEU\u2019S PAINTINGS OF TRAUMA AND DESIRE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pareidolia, the brain\u2019s tendency to find\u00a0<\/b>familiar patterns or images in the visual world, wasn\u2019t always understood as a natural cognitive function: finding a human face in the passing clouds was once considered a sign of losing your mind. Staring at the work of the Haitian-Canadian painter\u00a0Manuel Mathieu<\/a>, who lives and works mostly in Montreal, is often like having that instinct teased. What at first appears to be a haunting field of steamrolled, amorphous shapes resolves into images of tenderness or brutality: the melting figure of a mother clutching her child (Rempart<\/i>, 2018), a man on the brink of public execution by firing squad (Numa<\/i>, 2017), or President Kennedy\u2019s head blown open across the hood of a limousine (Zapruder\/313<\/i>, 2016). Viewers\u2019 first reactions might be to distrust their senses, and to question whether they\u2019ve invented whatever latent images Mathieu has buried in his canvases. The artist makes paintings about history, memory, identity, and power. And about\u00a0Haiti<\/a>, almost always. He looks at his birthplace\u2014its political history, its residual tensions, its traumatized subconscious, its self-imposed amnesia\u2014as a prism through which he interprets the world.<\/p>\n

Mathieu was born in 1986 in Port-au-Prince, eight months after uprisings ended a violent thirty-year dictatorship. His maternal grandfather was a colonel in Jean-Claude Duvalier\u2019s regime; several members of his father\u2019s family were among the tens of thousands killed under the successive reigns of Papa Doc and Baby Doc. As a teenager, Mathieu passed the time hanging out with his cousin, the artist Mario Benjamin, who makes ominous portraits of Black faces materializing from the shadows. Benjamin\u2019s house was stuffed with catalogues and back issues of\u00a0Art in America<\/i>, in which Mathieu discovered some of his early artistic influences: Bacon, Tuymans, and de Kooning, whom he read about obsessively. He was charmed too by the artistes de la Grande Rue, with whom he hung out at night, as they upcycled the city\u2019s jetsam into sculptures that explore spiritual aspects of Haitian life.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Manuel Mathieu,\u00a0Bennett<\/em>, 2018, mixed mediums, 60 by 54 inches.<\/span>COURTESY\u00a0KAVI GUPTA<\/a><\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Mathieu\u2019s works spring from an archive of found photographs and JPEGs, but the source images have been annihilated through techniques like scratching, frottage, drawing, and dripping. \u201cI use the structure of the image or subject as a reference, but I naturally drift from it,\u201d he told me in a February phone interview. Once he\u2019s satisfied with whatever he\u2019s made, he mutilates it, abrading the canvas by rubbing and scraping off layers of paint, then reintroducing impastoed snarls of muted color. As a result, these figures, adrift in their anonymous settings, appear to be constantly mutating, in flux. \u201cI only paint what changes me,\u201d Mathieu told the Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat last year, during a public conversation in conjunction with the artist\u2019s exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto. What this means, I think, is that he doesn\u2019t take his subject matter lightly. He is interested, he says, in \u201cnarrational voids\u201d from Haiti\u2019s revolutionary history\u2014scenes that he renders with expressionist gestures, planting them in a zone between abstraction and figuration. Are these bodies emerging from the canvas or being erased from it? Are they calling attention to themselves or parrying our gaze?<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2015, while studying at Goldsmiths in London, Mathieu was hit by a motorbike and nearly killed. He suffered a concussion and a fractured jaw, lost his short-term memory<\/a>, and had a black eye for eight months. Over time, his injuries healed, but the headaches lingered and his memory never quite snapped back. He began a series of paintings that connected the scars his body still carried with the traumas of his homeland, illuminating how history can continue to disfigure the present if we refuse to confront it. He made a monstrous portrait of Duvalier\u2019s ex-wife, Mich\u00e8le Bennett, on their $4-million wedding day (Bennett<\/i>, 2018); another of a Duvalier-era prison sometimes called \u201cHaiti\u2019s Auschwitz\u201d (Fort Dimanche<\/i>, 2017). Cultural materialists might refer to these moments as residue, fragments of the past that loiter in the present. I think Mathieu, in his numinous way of speaking, would call them \u201csoul wounds.\u201d Art that depicts atrocity often risks spoiling itself with sensationalism, but Mathieu doesn\u2019t try to transcribe reality. He paints the aftermath, interprets the feeling. He says he works in a world of sensations. \u201cThe real challenge with trauma<\/a>,\u201d he tells me, \u201cor the mechanism of not looking at our trauma, is that we lose the tools to face it. And so the colonial agenda continues.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"Manuel<\/div>\n<\/div>
Manuel Mathieu,\u00a0Resilience\u2014A Landscape of Desire<\/em>, 2020,
\nfabric, ink, and dust, 80 by 110 by 3 inches.<\/span>COURTESY KAVI GUPTA<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

But trauma isn\u2019t his only focus. When we spoke, he was preparing for an April solo show at Kavi Gupta in Chicago (another is scheduled to open at Matthew Brown in Los Angeles in June). The Chicago show\u2019s theme, he said, is desire, and he\u2019d have liked to name it \u201cHow to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired,\u201d after a 1989 novel by Dany Laferri\u00e8re, had the author allowed it. The new title is \u201cNegroland: A Landscape of Desire.\u201d (The apparent reference to critic Margo Jefferson\u2019s book\u00a0Negroland: A Memoir<\/i>\u00a0was accidental.) He started exploring ways of articulating desire during a residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Experimenting with scorched fabric, he ended up with\u00a0Resilience: A Landscape of Desire<\/i>\u00a0(2020) and\u00a0Ouroboros<\/i>\u00a0(2020), which both include large panels of cotton the artist has burnt and left tattered. \u201cDesire is something that can be very fatal, and, at the same time, it can be very generative,\u201d he says. \u201cI want to talk about our ephemerality, about fucking, about cumming, about birth, about death. It\u2019s important in our experience as Black people that we have a certain elasticity on our existence, and that it isn\u2019t just about our survival.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Source\uff1ahttps:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pareidolia, the brain\u2019s tendency to find\u00a0familiar patterns or images in the visual world, wasn\u2019t always understood as a natural cognitive function: finding a human face in the passing clouds was once considered a sign of losing your mind. Staring at the work of the Haitian-Canadian painter\u00a0Manuel Mathieu, who lives and works mostly in Montreal, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,7,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-682","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-auction","9":"category-events","10":"category-gallery","11":"category-latest-news"},"yoast_head":"\nMANUEL MATHIEU\u2019S PAINTINGS OF TRAUMA AND DESIRE - Investable Art Auctioneer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Pareidolia, the brain\u2019s tendency to find\u00a0familiar patterns or images in the visual world, wasn\u2019t always understood as a natural cognitive function\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/auction\/manuel-mathieus-paintings-of-trauma-and-desire\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"MANUEL MATHIEU\u2019S PAINTINGS OF TRAUMA AND DESIRE - 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