Tajan ArtStudio presents a new gallery exhibition : Daily Wonders by the figurative french painter Mathieu Cherkit. At l’Espace Tajan, the young artist reproduces the reality of his familiar places, his daily wonders…
It is a world of plenteousness, plenteous objects and vegetation in interiors and gardens where nothing happens. It is said that filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni once told painter Mark Rothko: « Your paintings are like my films – they’re about nothing… with precision » (1).
If attention to detail be the mark of precision, then it suffuses Mathieu Cherkit’s paintings in the abundance of details disseminated within his monumental compositions. These details are the clues to a narrative that wants reconstructing, an investigation that wants conducting. Around nothingness something eventually springs, the traces or the beginnings of a story. When describing his works the artist ironically refers to « Cluedo », the board game where players must find the perpetrator of a murder committed in a manor house. This reference illustrates part of what can be seen on the canvas.
Characters are absent, with the exception of the human figures seen on a few reproductions of paintings stuck on a wall, or of two feet at the base of a composition – fragmentary evidence of an elongated body that remains out of the frame. Mystery and ellipsis are two characteristics of this world. It is also a world of density, where the banality of dead time appears in the multiplicity of its manifestations, straddling repose and tension. Insects weave through the grass, birds hide in the foliage; they are discrete actors of the moments frozen in painting. They are resurgences of the frog and the bullfinch that no one noticed in Manet’s « Luncheon on the Grass »…
Marc Desgrandschamps
(1) Rothko, éditions Skira, texte de Jeffrey Weiss
> CATALOGUE > OPENING RECEPTION
Mathieu Cherkit, Daily Wonders / October 13-22, 2017 – 37, rue des Mathurins 75008 Paris – Preview : October 12.
