HdM Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Manuel Mathieu’s solo exhibition “Son of Voodoo” curated by Lu Mingjun on November 20, 2021. This is the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery. It includes his new paintings and works on paper. It will last until December 31, 2021.
Since his first exhibition at HdM Gallery Beijing in 2018, Manuel Mathieu’s work has retained its innate strength while undergoing some evolutions. The artist has developed outside painting, producing installations and sculptures with various materials including ceramics and cloths. In his paintings, he has enlarged his palette and experimented with dust, silicon as well as burnt cloth. For him, his instillations and his paintings have a dialectical relationship.
In the present group of works, Manuel Mathieu has been influenced by the concept of libation, an ancient ritual whereby a liquid was poured onto the floor as a way to honor the gods, attract good fortune or pay respect to the dead. Mathieu tries to envision his paintings as a kind of iteration of himself, hitting against the ground and spreading around. As a result, the largest painting of the exhibition is entitled The First Drop while others are called Portrait. In the composition of these works, Manuel Mathieu attempted to suggest the idea of a gradual spread as well as a dialectical relationship between diluted, liquid areas that stand in for the drink poured during the libation, and more sculptural, solid areas that are meant to represent the ground drenched therewith. As such, Mathieu does not simply offer a straightforwardly abstract group of works, but rather he tries to endow his paintings with a symbolic force that verges on the transcendant.
Born in Haiti in 1986, Manuel Mathieu has already been widely exhibited. He enjoyed solo presentations of his work at the Power Plant in Toronto as well as at the Museum of Fine Arts Montreal. More recently, he participated in group exhibitions at Paul Kasmin Gallery New York and Gagosian Gallery London and at Song Museum Beijing. A major new exhibition of his works will be held in the summer of 2022 at Longlati Foundation in Shanghai.
