Imaginary Landscape came from Manuel Mathieu’s analyses of the phenomena of displacement, whether voluntary or forced, in the aftermath of his return to his birthplace of Port-au-Prince, Haiti after an earthquake. He found that the physical landscape to which his memories were tied no longer existed, at least not in the same way. The loss of concrete anchors to his past made the images that he created in his imagination seem to him as valid as his lived reality had once been.

“All the things that created my personal history changed forever,” Mathieu says. “The only trace to confirm the past existence of these spaces were my memories.”

Mathieu further reflected on the refugee crisis in Haiti, imagining masses of individuals moving from place to place with nothing but their imagination connecting them to their past and their identity. In this painting, masses of abstracted, biomorphic forms in the lower third of the canvas seem to be lined up at the border of a shadowy, ever-evolving hinterland.

“I kept thinking about the landscape they encountered walking towards their unknown final destination,” Mathieu says. “I found it very poetic because as you register these landscapes a part of you knows you will never see them again. Where is the line between your memory and your imagination and which one is more valuable, and valuable to what?”