Manuel Mathieu: Bathing in Flame, Nirvana and Alchemy
Feng Boyi
The first time I met with Manuel Mathieu was in the lobby of Shanghai chi K11 Art Museum. After a handshake and a bit of small talk, we began to discuss the exhibition’s arrangement. During lunch, he took out a small bottle of perfume and a few test strips after we had sat down. He asked me to smell the scent which he had made, and after I had smelt it I said “sexy taste” because of my poor level of English. He laughed as a result of what could be called “the connivance between men”. After a few minutes, I knew that both of us were born in October under the same star sign (Libra): the natural smell had reduced the age and generation gap between us. It felt at once like an old friend!
When I smelled his perfume, the scenario of the movie Perfume: The Story of Murderer (2006), directed by Tom Tykwer, came to my mind. A story of betrayal about a young man with an unusually acute sense of smell. Even though Mathieu is not like the main character of the movie, I felt like they could have met by chance because they had almost the same mindset and temperament.
I was surprised that Mathieu did not show me his artwork first, even if the perfume was also produced by him. Maybe this is how an artist from this generation treats life or art: it doesn't matter if they were completely separated in the past, nor is there a deliberate emphasis on the intermingling of daily life and art. For them, life, fashion, and artistic creation are all part of one same whole.
Mathieu was born in 1986 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He studied Visual and Media Arts at the University of Quebec, Montréal and obtained a Master’s in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, London in 2016. He now lives and works in Montréal, Canada. His artistic career should have started in Canada. He said that his uncle, Mario Benjamin, is a famous artist in Haiti. According to the phrase currently popular in China, Mathieu is a "second generation artist". Haiti seems a very strange place to me: in my mind the citizens of Haiti never speak with people from the outside and the society is always in turmoil. I could only remember that after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Chinese artist Jiang Guo set up a contemporary art charity auction called For Haiti conducted by Guardian Auction House. We did not know anything of the art history or contemporary art scene of Haiti at the time because we always focus on the art system in Europe and America.
Even though I had looked at his artwork carefully and had communicated with him, I thought that Mathieu’s immigration to Canada, his experience studying abroad, his nomadic history, his identity, and the specific and nuanced situation of Canada were the stimuli of his creation. The historical tradition of Haiti, its memory, and its realistic culture were also connected with it, as is the local life experience. Mathieu is in a zone neighboring the edge and chaos existing between different cultures. The feeling of having survived a particular situation, and the representation of this achievement are not exactly the same. But it nonetheless made him become very sensitive to many cultures and ideas. For example, he mainly focuses on abstract, expressive paintings such as Purple Gaze, The Architect, Les Immortels and The Portrait on the Surface, etc.... These paintings not only possess a twisted and absurd visual tension, but also the mystery of witchcraft, and the suggestion of horror. It is a weird shadow that he extracts from the picture, coated with an authentic and simple wild charm. That is the reason why Mathieu’s artworks can no longer be classified or identified by the original ecology of the region. From some random scenario, his artworks reflect the multicultural characteristics of a globalized context. It contains his homeland’s cultural element, and an influence carried from the identity of the “other”, and it combines them with the multi-dimensional expression of global art. Therefore, this kind of nomadism, migration, and dwelling between multiple cultures does not feel more or less inconsistent with the situation which we face in globalization, but it is just a kind of globalization with a kind of “jet lag".
Before the epidemic, the rapid cultural globalization and development of the internet made artworks and identities from around the world collide with each other. When they were not created locally, they displayed a connection with their adoptive territory. Therein is a huge difference between this kind of creative status and the previous one which was solely connected to the original culture. Especially for artists from third-world countries, it is very apparent when they have studied abroad or emigrated to developed countries to create. For Mathieu, the “self” is the essence which embodies a continuous interaction, the dialogue and integration between different cultures, the communication and mix between them. With the passing of time, immigrants have gradually integrated into the local culture of their adoptive country and have a more rational examination and cognition of their cultural identity. Although the post-epidemic stage has brought "globalization" to an inflection point, it does not signify the end of it. A globalized contemporary art, with artistic expression between two or more cultures, local or foreign, visible and hidden, is becoming the norm. With its marginal and alternative hybridity, it has become a trend within the international artistic output.
This is a cultural phenomenon that follows spatial displacement and flow, and it is an iteration of globalized art. In other words, due to the changes within Mathieu's living environment and cultural identity, it triggered a new process of adaptation, thinking and creation suited to the new habitat. Therefore, with regards to the works in this exhibition of Mathieu, we can no longer simply say that his artworks inherit directly or indirectly their modernity from the traditional and realistic culture of Haiti. We can’t use "tradition and contemporary" as the main basis to make a judgment on his works; instead we should try to see more of the results of understanding, approach, connection, and communication between him and foreign cultures. Also, we should try to discover, pay attention to, and research their artistic value in their intermediary context. We should take the value orientation of Mathieu's artistic creation, understand not only what he tries to attempt in the context of cross-cultural time and space, but also his practice of his own style of self-awareness and personal reflection.
I noticed in particular several of his installation works, such as Ouroboros, which he built with burnt fabric made into a window-shaped channel. It looks like you can walk through it; Transient is the suspension of the remains of annealed cloths; it shows a sense of sharpness, injury and danger. His love for the ruins of a "baptism of fire" is just like a kind of "alchemy" in an artistic output produced in order to obtain a "renaissance" after "Nirvana". On this basis I decided on Rising from the Ashes as the title of Mathieu's solo exhibition —with the help of Chinese idioms as the key words of the themes.
Rising from the Ashes literally means to go through the torment of a painful test. One will finally be reborn and achieve sublimation in rebirth. This is the meaning of its extension: I tried to use Mathieu’s immigration, migration, surviving on a nomadic lifestyle, multiple identity, creative experience, the art of “alchemy” and a multiformat visual language to present his artistic inspiration, his experience of living with “localization” and the future scenario of his personal emotional journey. This includes not only the realization of one’s uniqueness in globalization, where different cultures collide with each other, but also the anxiety and confusion of "where is home", because "hometown" is the antinomy of "foreign land". However, there is a far distance and a difference in culture between “foreign land” and “hometown”. After breaking away from one’s original identity and extending one’s cultural order, paying attention and thinking about one’s newly constructed identity becomes important. It is maybe only through uninterrupted viewing with "two sets of eyes" that there is the possibility of further thinking, introspection and communication. It is also a complexified appearance that shortens the limited distance between himself, Haiti and foreign lands.
From the limited conversations I had with him, I learned that after he left Shanghai chi K11 Art Museum, he planned to go to Jingdezhen to investigate and experiment with ceramics. This will be one of the new works presented in the Shanghai chi K11 Art Museum solo exhibition. This shows he can base himself on different media to create a sense of the “local”, and there are not many Haitian ceramic creations that are based on Haiti’s local culture. He told me that the artistic tradition of China, including ceramic art, endowed him with a kind of creative power, and that he wanted to use the resources of Jingdezhen ceramic to connect with that tradition. As a medium, ceramics have unpredictable natural mysteries and inexhaustible "melting point" transformative energy within the ignition point of earth and fire in the kiln. His previous ceramic work All Spells not only transformed ceramics into an abstract and fragmented visual image, but also precipitated the feelings of nature and life into the shape of tentacle-shaped ceramics slats. Clay emerges from the world as a way to discover, think and gain awareness of material and even visual culture through the dust of time.
In order to maintain uniqueness, it is necessary to start from each person's own life experience, and not from the concepts and systems that have been formed previously. Everyone lives in their own time and space. If everyone is in a different time or space, everyone will create a particular scenario. This scenario will change based on the person themselves, others around them and their environment. Without the special experience of a character as the subject, everything outside will be meaningless. This is a "Community of Sense" that puts different artistic practices under the same banner. The art of this community of perception, I think, is not simply the art of exile and return, wandering and dwelling from one’s hometown to a foreign land, but may be an intense presentation of multicultural and diverse art.
From Mathieu’s artistic point of view, the public might do away with the soulful “gaze” of the bygone era of Emotionalism. The visual pieces are “flashing” and never stop spanning together. The aesthetic structure displays a strain and a poetic style with perfection. This element makes visitors feel the artistic charm while accepting the artist’s outlook. This emotional culture has become a fashionable way of life for people even in the field of the artistic avant-garde that advocates individual creation and formal experimentation. This characteristic is a particular cognitive orientation in the face of current time, capturing and fixing fragments and moments in an uncertain flow.
Fortunately, artistic creation is expressed and presented by means of multiple media such as modeling, schema, video, etc., thus avoiding the confusion of whether to use the mother tongue or a foreign language for writing in literary symbols, especially in the process of textual translation. In this context, mistranslation and misreading can be obstacles. Visual culture can be widely communicated beyond the limitation of this type of translation. Art is also an enclave beyond social reality, a paradise where human beings can live. Like the art of Mathieu—it is a seed that can take root and sprout across geographical and cultural regional boundaries.
About the Curator:
Feng boyi, Male, Born in 1960s, Han Nationality, Regular Citizen from China; Major in History; Married; Blood type B; Rat Phase; Constellation: Libra, Ascendant Constellation: Virgo. From the late 1980s until now, He is a good editor, critic and editor.