For Manuel Mathieu, art begins where time fractures, opening an infinite field. His work is informed by the liberatory legacy of Haiti’s art, literature, music and spirituality, as well as by Haiti’s contemporary challenges. While painting anchors his practice, ceramics, mosaic, film and scent extend the inquiry and material vocabulary. In his mixed-media works on canvas, marked boxes become metonyms for corporeality, interrogating the body’s perimeter and its relational field.
In the mosaic Abundance and Drought (2024), which emerged during research for a public art project in Montreal (where Mathieu has lived since age nineteen), a geological imprint becomes a metaphor for continuity, contrasting with the fragility of social and political structures that shape empathy. The short film Pendulum (2023), presented as a double-sided screen installation with sculptural and olfactory elements, examines what follows emancipation, while the title of the painting GENOCIDE (2026) becomes a stark testament to the present moment, acknowledging crisis and insisting on confrontation. Mathieu’s work asks not only what we perceive now, but how we choose to act, remember and imagine what comes next.
—Dominique Fontaine
