Manuel Mathieu

Manuel Mathieu’s Prémices/Open-Ended, the solo exhibit by the young Haitian-born Montreal resident, comprises some dozen paintings dealing with the organic and mental reconstruction that follows a cataclysmic event.

Mathieu’s paintings depict scenes of a world violently squeezed into primordial swirls of aggression, inchoate shapes and forces, sometimes in an extension of the old, sometimes in conflict with their antecedents. This transmutation is not a step towards anything evil-from a frenzied clapperclawing creature, to what seems a somewhat lost hodgepodge of unformed will, passion, and nascent power.  In one of the more memorable paintings, an anthropomorphic swirl of greens, reds, and blacks, with bared vice-teeth, melts into a whirlpool of dark swathes. No surprise, from a man who has been compared to Francis Bacon.

In another, Mathieu cleverly plays with perspectives, depositing a humanoid figure on a large plot of stark white, tilted below the perfunctory desert backdrop of the painting. The shape seems to ooze unctuously down the canvas in a curious, and, perhaps unintentional manner.

The majority of the paintings, however, neither galvanize one’s thoughts, nor spur emotions, nor help find any hint of truth. Despite my repeated attempts to engage with the pieces, I felt like I was approaching glib prints, as evocative only as the confusion within first few moments of seeing them, before I fully grasped what I was staring at. The swirls and eddies of paint lie silently on the canvas, as paint is wont to do before it is given a voice through some artistic enterprise. This is all the more unfortunate since Mathieu seems to possess something worth saying. While I may be wrong, I suspect the devastation left by the recent Haitian earthquake is the source of his thick, resolutely applied brushstrokes.

Without the exhibition’s obligatory description, distributed to the public in a pamphlet upon entry, it is difficult to orient oneself enough to get much from the paintings. Thankfully, the show focuses on the description to a lesser degree than what has become the norm. The practice of describing the artist’s litany of intentions and thoughts subsumed by the creative process is now ubiquitous, and robs the gallery attendee of a singular pleasure. It is through this pleasure, which we acquire through visually tasting and digesting the work offered, that we achieve some manner of understanding and camaraderie with the artist. In reading a formulaic description, we are rewarded with a vacuum-sealed, ersatz satiety in regards to the piece, forgoing the necessary mental labour.

I am curious to see Mathieu progress over the next few years. In the meantime though, give me Bacon.

Prémices/Open-Ended runs from May 5 (Tuesday-Saturday, 12-6 p.m.) at the MAI (3680 Rue Jeanne-Mance, Local 103)