The Mental Split, 2023
Manuel Mathieu, born in 1986, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He lives and works in Montreal.
Haiti and its spirits: these are the elements that inhabit Manuel Mathieu's work. Natural breaths and energies, magical and spiritual materials are blended into the mysterious skin that is his canvas.
Manuel Mathieu left this island at the end of the world as a teenager, fleeing an unstable political regime to join his family in Canada. Like a wound that never healed, this childhood on the volcanic island was to be the source of the artist's inexhaustible imagination.
A second trauma, this time a physical one, shook up his life once again. On leaving Goldsmiths in London, where he was studying, Manuel Mathieu was knocked down in the street. He remained in a deep coma and continues to carry the weight of his head injury to this day. His art is nourished by these two traumas, which resonate for the artist.
In this way, his works are both the reincarnation of the energies of his lost Haiti and the awakening of his personal accident, which overshadows part of his life.
Mathieu's work has been exhibited in major museums, including the Grand Palais in Paris, the Museum of the Americas in Washington and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. His paintings have been collected by the Rubell family, JP Morgan New York and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.