Rising star Manuel Mathieu paints ideas when they're too complex for words

"I loved my grandmother because she knew that, sometimes, loving someone meant not telling them what to do," says Montreal-based painter Manuel Mathieu. The late matriarch welcomed him to Canada at the age of 19, when he moved from his native Haiti. "She was my backbone, and having this safety net meant that I could really put myself out there more." 

Since his arrival in Quebec in 2005, Mathieu has become one of the province's most well-recognized artists — and family has been not only a critical support in his remarkable journey, but an important source of inspiration as well. 

Thanks to a strong visual identity combining traditions of abstract expressionism, surrealism and conceptualism, with a deeply felt connection to his cultural roots in Haiti, the artist creates all-encompassing environments using paintings, ceramics and drawings that are as emotionally moving as they are thought-provoking. Gaining attention both at home and abroad, the artist is currently the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, and this fall, his work will be featured in the Toronto Biennial of Art.

Sitting in his studio in Montreal, Mathieu addresses the inspiration behind some of his most incisive works: "I start a painting when it becomes impossible to paint, when the concept becomes so complex that it leaves the realm of words and enters the sphere of my imagination." The impossibility of depicting social situations, like revolution or civil war, that are so multifaceted they cannot be contained in one single image has led the artist to build colourful worlds across disciplines and media.

Mathieu's intensely gestural and textured paintings are often larger-than-life in scale and impressive to behold. They strikingly tell stories of Haiti's 1791 revolt against slavery; the Duvalier regime and its legacy of violence; as well as globalization, creolization and diasporic trajectories; while also pondering intellectual movements rooted in Caribbean decolonization philosophies.

This is the case in Siimone, an acrylic, chalk and charcoal portrait of a heavily distorted fleshly figure, adorned with a purple hat. The work depicts Simone Duvalier, the former first lady of Haiti and wife of the dictator François Duvalier. Gesturing at the familial power behind the head of state, Mathieu's portrait embodies a muddled history of nepotism and corruption.

While the artworks function on a certain universal level, allowing audiences to enter them from different perspectives, it is through the incredible arc of Mathieu's personal history that some of the underlying themes and structures come to make the most sense.

"I had the chance to grow up in a house surrounded by beauty," Mathieu recognizes about his childhood in Port-au-Prince. "My mother had a particular sensibility for paintings and objects that I took for granted until I met my father's cousin, Mario, who properly introduced me to contemporary art." Raised by a family of intellectuals — his father a former agriculture minister and his mother a PhD in psychology who collected art — Mathieu was exposed early on to canonical art through his relative, Mario Benjamin, himself a renowned Haitian painter.

Mathieu used his room as his first experimental studio. "It's the only place I lived in that mimicked exactly what I felt in my head," he remembers fondly about this place of wonder. "When I entered my room, I felt like I was inside of myself." As he began to build his own  installations, Mathieu thrived on the boundless creativity, permission to explore and sense of possibility he found in artists like Mona Hatoum, Clyfford Still and Joel-Peter Witkin, whom he discovered through books and catalogues borrowed from Benjamin.

After studying painting at Université du Québec à Montréal as an undergraduate student, Mathieu moved to London in 2013 and attended Goldsmiths to pursue its prestigious MFA. Leaving Quebec was an intentional decision. "I didn't feel like there was room for me and my thinking to be recognized," he says, alluding to the lack of opportunities for many racialized visual artists in Canada before social movements like Black Lives Matter raised consciousness about these inequities.

Then, in 2015, while in London, Mathieu was struck by a moped in a road accident that drastically changed the trajectory of his career. Isolated and in a long convalescence due to the extent of the trauma — while his grandmother was also ailing — he turned toward his family's heritage as new source material.

"I was developing a new body of work [on philosopher Georges Bataille] for my MFA show, after the accident, and I asked myself, if this was my last show, would it be about Bataille? The answer was no," he says. "It's only then that I understood the value of talking about what mattered to me through the lens of my personal stories and my historical legacy. The accident got me closer to myself." 

This change brought new depth to the work, but it also gave it a soul and spiritual dimension that bleeds into the gallery spaces his installations inhabit.

Following graduation from Goldsmiths, Mathieu returned to Montreal and his career began its true meteoric rise. His first U.S. solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta Gallery in 2018 was a major success, followed by numerous group shows across Europe and Asia. In 2020, he was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award, and that same year, he presented World Discovered Under Other Skies at the Power Plant in Toronto, a solo exhibition that later travelled to Winnipeg's Plug In ICA, the Art Gallery of Alberta, Art Windsor Essex and Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, N.B.

Mathieu's most recent exhibition, Dwelling on the Invisible, at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami has been particularly resonant, given the city's status as one of the biggest diasporic Haitian communities in the world. 

"This show changed my life," Mathieu says. "We had a group of elders coming to the exhibition and three of them said to me they had seen the execution of [Marcel] Numa with their own eyes." (Numa was a member of a group of exiles called Jeune Haiti who tried to overthrow Duvalier in 1964.)

Mathieu is clearly moved by the power of his artwork to form genuine connections with the community and culture that have inspired it. "I didn't know how important that could be until these conversations happened," he recalls, "I've always wanted people from my community to be touched by the work, because it's for them."

In the final room of Dwelling on the Invisible, Mathieu presents a new body of work that includes a sculpture made of rebar, abstract ceramic forms and burnt canvas; a black-and-white photograph of an abandoned construction project in Port-au-Prince's Carrefour Feuilles neighbourhood; and a documentary-style video titled Dife ("fire" in Haitian Creole), which captures the chaos of protests in Haiti.

This part of the exhibition — a media- and sculpture-forward installation that complements and even completes the universes proposed in his paintings — feels particularly raw. It is even more akin to stepping into the artist's mind. True to his adventurous self, Mathieu is willing to try something different.

"I've never done monotone ceramics and it's my first time showing photography and video like that," Mathieu says with enthusiasm about this new phase in his practice. "There's still room for me to figure things out. I didn't start making art to always have the right answers. I signed up to keep on exploring."

Manuel Mathieu: World Discovered Under Other Skies | Dwelling on the Invisible is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami through October 6. The artist will be part of the Toronto Biennial of Art opening September 21. He is also working on a perfume line called Chapter 1 that will be bottled in his signature ceramics work.