Manuel Mathieu: The end of figuration

17 Feb-27 May 2024

Overview

De La Warr Pavilion presents The end of figuration, Manuel Mathieu’s first major institutional presentation in Europe. Manuel Mathieu (b. 1986, Haiti) 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 and artistic influences and traditions, Mathieu aims to find meaning through a spiritual mode of apparition. 
 
Through his work, 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. The vibrational effect of his work elicits physical and emotional frequencies that offer alternative methods for navigating the world.  
 
This exhibition focuses on a new series of paintings and a site-specific fabric installation reaching through the centre of the gallery. As a gateway that can issue forth alternate modes of reality, Mathieu harnesses the power of abstraction to create an installation that shifts from two to three dimensions across painting, ceramics, and fabric. This mixing of mediums and hybrid thinking is underpinned by a provocation: how might we conceive the end of figuration within art making, so that what we see in a work is only that which we wish to find? In the posing of this question, Mathieu simultaneously highlights art’s inevitable failure to capture reality alongside its potential to be an illuminating vehicle for processing our past and present experiences. In speaking about the project, the artist says: ‘This false dichotomy between abstraction and figuration is obsolete. From my perspective, figuration is a mode of apparition within abstraction’.
 
In attempting to represent that which is often unrepresentable – the emotive, intimate, violent, and chaotic energies that charge our everyday experiences – Mathieu’s works are rendered as apparitions that crystallise and dissipate in the moments of our looking. The role played by the viewer in activating each artwork is key, which are released into the world by the artist as a series of ephemeral, yet infinite, invitations.
 

Artists