The story of Dear melancholy by Manuel Mathieu begins with the end of the winter torpor. Browns, grays and reds collide and flow on the painting that gave its name to the exhibition presented at the Hugues Charbonneau gallery, with an emotional intensity that evokes that of an Edvard Munch – a spontaneous disenchantment.
“Melancholy came into my studio five or six months ago, and I decided to tame it on the canvas,” says the Montreal artist from Haiti, who returns to the metropolis after a tour. which took him to Toronto, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Beijing and Shanghai. If usually his vibrant paintings with an abstract and mystical visual language challenge with their palpable sensuality, this time they arouse an instinctive spleen. “I then began to question myself, without having obvious answers, and to want to deepen and cherish these emotions”, he recalls.
Failing to apply melancholy mechanically to his work, Manuel Mathieu preferred the possibility of feeling it fully through his paintings, his sculptures, his poems. “You have to live it and accept that it can manifest itself in different ways,” he warns. A delicate task, according to him, since artists are often said to have a tormented spirit… It only took a brief moment of doubt for the artist to finally pursue this path of acceptance, with an honest approach, but never frontal.
Like the nature that surrounds him, his “first teacher”, the artist wants to make survival in darkness and chaos a strength. In this regard, he remarks that “humans do it every day to fight against the unknown”. The furye, The Witch, starry bed or The eye of the massifsomething as disturbing as comforting emanates from the exhibition, where Manuel Mathieu whispers to us in front of each work to remain on our guard, the time that this dear melancholy evaporates.
“It’s not a conclusion, but a step to live something else. For Manuel Mathieu, melancholy is also a temporary and suspended state that we can allow ourselves to savor and which can, sometimes, metamorphose into resilience, save us. “It is essential for me to show, through my work, a positive energy despite the most difficult times, to bounce back”, explains the artist, who does not erect a wall between his emotions, his intimacy and his career. And to add: “Everything is intrinsically linked, and I am not about to compromise all of what drives me. » Dear melancholy translates, in fact, the expansion of the art of Manuel Mathieu that nothing, and especially not the vague soul, seems likely to stop.
A glowing aura
“I feel the maturity of your soul in your work,” the 35-year-old artist was rightly told by a visitor at a recent exhibition in Beijing. “This is not a speech that we hold in the West. A few artists explore this spiritual connection to their work, but these are underdogs “, he believes. Manuel Mathieu considers himself today as one of those.
“The Chinese public approaches art with spirituality, and I recognize myself in this approach which, I hope, will be able to convince the Montreal public. Conversely, Manuel Mathieu is irritated by our narrow view of culture and the propensity to label genres. “Always wanting to put things into words is an elitism that prevents the true democratization of art. Someone who knows nothing about it has as much to say as someone who has studied it. Art makes it possible to feel things and, if there is a hierarchy in the feeling, that means, in my opinion, that we compromise the humanity of a person”, underlines the one who puts a point of honor to remain open and inclusive.
Manuel Mathieu believes that, if he has been confined to too specific subjects for too long, everything changed when he began to think about the aura of the works. “I started working on projects that challenge the relationship between figuration and abstraction. I find this dichotomy, this bipolarity, to be obsolete. It’s not one or the other, but with each other”, he says with the idea of linking the conceptual, the emotional and the rational. “This is where I fell into the most personal, my melancholy. »
Although he learned to explain his artistic approach in a concrete and academic way during his studies at Goldsmiths College in London, Manuel Mathieu now opts for a frank conversation with his audience. “Each of my paintings has its own intelligence, its own tempo, and does not need to justify its presence”, he observes. For this reason, he is all the more interested in the subjectivity of the other in the face of his visual energy. “I really want to know what visitors feel when they go to the Hugues Charbonneau gallery, what is their perception of melancholy. »