Laurent Binet, the Prix Goncourt in 2010 for First Novel "HHhH", gave me the pleasure of writing this text ...
The eye in listening, about Dutch painting, Claudel wrote, "it will happen something." Was it the tense, this sentence could be applied to tables of Mathieu Borderon. Except that in the tables of Mathieu Borderon or it is something happening, or it happened something.
At the end of Mad Love, Andre Breton, among a thousand other definitions that dot his work, defines beauty in these words: "exploding fixed", and it is ideally suited to the work of Mathieu . A part of his work, to be precise. There are actually a component "exploding fixed" (there's something going on) and a component "exploded vitrified" (it happened something). One could, in the appendix, add a third component, something like "hypothetical gas" but this aspect infused here and there over the other two it is a branch of its own.
Vitreous exploded? It is the mineral portion of the work, which, behind Abstract Expressionism evokes lunar landscapes, devastated, behind the mist which monochromatic palpating the rough surface of things, the relief of a fibrous bedrock, rocky , the hard reality, these bumps that are the fabric of braille (and I remember this blind galierist played by Sami Frey in Deadly Trail). I know that, like Pollock and Rothko, Mathieu refuses to give titles to his works not to influence the viewer, not to direct his gaze, he could give free rein to his imagination. I respect that but I can not talk without his painting, one way or another, about what I see. Not to draw grooves in which you would hire the wheel of your imagination like a rail, I'll just comment on one table that has a title and who, precisely, chance would have it, is called "Paths cross. " This table, the minute I saw him, I mentioned the island of Manhattan, ossified version of Manhattan Island, as a skeleton of civilization, something post-something (post- Modern? post-September 11? no idea!) but still bathed in amniotic fluid suggests that I do not know what, abortion, rebirth, cleaning with bleach, I'm not trying to find consistency in the table, I get the images like so many stimuli that speak to my imagination, that is to say to my intelligence for the imagination, let us not forget, is a cultural construct, but without talking to my intelligence that it cares about make sense, logic or continuity. A kind of raw intelligence stimulated by this table tells me: Manhattan fossilized skeleton of the world, amniotic bleach.
Explosante fixed now, the plant part first, these species of wild flowers that splash every corner of the canvas, green period, the red period, blue period: the speed of periods is proportional to what is happening on the canvas, no question of spending years, few weeks are enough, probably, given the speed of production and already the White biting the blue paint is a mountain Mathieu Borderon thermal Russian blows hot and cold of a the other series. (But this angle of the theme color, no mixing: each table is hot OR cold).
A hybrid word on this table, vegetable and mineral same time, moonlight whack the gradient ambiguous: the more I look, the more I feel like trapped in a song by Nick Cave. This table has a separate status, perhaps, in the work: neither rocks nor leaves but dead wood in the swamps, no explosion, a calm quite unusual, I can not know if this table contains the key to all other, or if after the forward or next to all other, or if it is an anomaly in the work.
Closed parenthesis in Table bastard already a perceptible change in the exploding fixed, the plant which slides into the high-tech missiles sunflowers and bouquets with the knife further accelerating and fly into the red sky of cities such Blade Runner. Everything fits together: "Blade Runner", and the blade runner ... Air traffic on the bottom of the fifth element, the mechanical birds Mathieu Borderon always fly at 200 miles an hour.
In Camera Lucida, Barthes forge two concepts it uses to analyze photographs: the studium that covers the whole atmosphere of the image, its spirit, its atmosphere, its general theme (sunsets, mom to the beach The Place de la Concorde ...), and the punctum, the detail nestled in the picture that is its true center, the point to which the eye, more or less consciously focused. This may be the yaw defeated a boy, a belt loop, a reflection, a wave of his hand, the broken pane of a window. There is a table illustrating Mathieu Borderon so this idea of punctum that I can not not mention: this table is found in scattered fragments swept away by the blast of an explosion, projected diagonally, right corner top to bottom left corner (or vice versa, whatever). In such arrays, it is as if the line of flight was to understand the literal sense! However, in the middle of this debacle (not quite in the middle, really), we have this black and white pattern that will not in the same direction as all other grounds spread with a knife, which cuts the diagonal in a vertical upward movement. I'm still doing what he should not do, forgive me: it looks like a bird that tries to wrest the blizzard of aerial combat, trapped in the howl of the metal, preventing debris from the breath of explosion. Looks like what we want, of course, and a thousand other things. But no one can dispute, I think that this little bird who fights for his life, or anything that evoked pattern in black and white, is the punctum of this table. And perhaps, so far, the epicenter of all the work of Mathieu Borderon.
Laurent Binet
December 30, 2011