Manuel Mathieu

Haitian history, trauma and the complexity of diasporic identity.

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Vibrating between the figurative and the abstract, Manuel Mathieu’s solo exhibition, World Discovered Under Other Skies, uses paint – smeared, rubbed, gouged, dripped – to convey a sense of pain that is visceral but hard to pinpoint. Layered and complex, the Haitian Canadian artist’s work suggests submerged trauma viewers must work to unpack. 

Curated by Amin Alsaden and organized and circulated by the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, the show, at Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art until April 3, is slightly scaled down but still conveys a strong sense of Mathieu’s working process over the last decade.

One can see an ongoing dialogue among his drawings, paintings and flat ceramic pieces. The drawings, for example, are often small, sometimes delicate, with linear forms that suggest biomorphic bursts or strange cartographies. They also act as an experimental ground where the Montreal-based Mathieu works through ideas and feelings that are later channelled into his big-impact paintings. 

In Asemic 2, the title a reference to writing without semantic content, the radiating and repeating lines are the ominous colour of dried blood. A figure, barely suggested by the curves of its protective posture, moves toward the surface but doesn’t quite reach it. 

This subterranean power transfers to the paintings, which have an almost three-dimensional tactility, developed through Mathieu’s use of thick acrylic paint, along with oil stick, chalk, charcoal and, also at times, the addition of tape, fragments of hair, dust and dirt.

Zapruder/313, based on a film frame of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, starts as a collection of fluid organic shapes that resolve, with sudden shock, into a broken head and brains blown across a Lincoln Continental limo. 

Much of the work deals with Haiti, a nation born from a slave revolt, which has survived American occupation, Cold War tensions, brutal kleptocratic dictatorships and state violence. (Mathieu was born in Port-au-Prince in 1986, the year Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled to exile in France.) Fort Dimanche references a prison where political prisoners were tortured and killed, while the title of Numa suggests the execution of Marcel Numa, member of a group of young Haitians who challenged the Duvalier regime. Simone, a kind of portrait of Simone Duvalier, wife of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and a palace power in her own right, is a massive close-up of her face, so broken up into a welter of brushwork that only the unmoving circles of her eyes are clearly delineated, in an expression at once hard and haunted. 

These paintings give a palpable, pulpy sense of the weight and duration of Mathieu’s physical and emotional process. They specifically refer to Haitian history but can’t be reduced to that one directed meaning, simultaneously suggesting larger dynamics of power and race, capitalism and colonialism, and the complexity of diasporic identity. 

Plug In has placed in its reception room a research area of books and articles related to the exhibition, which includes writers and theorists W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and Edwidge Danticat, as well works on such artists as Goya, Joel-Peter Witkin and Sol LeWitt. These texts supply critical context for World Discovered Under Other Skies, but this is not a didactic show. Its meanings, both personal and collective, contemporary and historical, abstract and embodied, are deeply embedded in the gestural paint, offering a slow surge of difficult truths. ■

Manuel Mathieu, World Discovered Under Other Skies, at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art from Jan. 14 to April 3, 2022.

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Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art

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