The Power Plant: Interview with Manuel Mathieu

World Discovered Under Other Skies, a solo exhibition featuring Manuel Mathieu, curated by Amin Alsaden, will take place in our galleries from January 14 until April 3, 2022. World Discovered Under Other Skies is organized and circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, where the exhibition was first displayed from September 26, 2020 to January 3, 2021.

Over the last decade, the Haitian-Canadian Mathieu has been consistently producing and developing an artistic practice that has flowed liberally between works on paper, paintings with sculptural tactility, and ceramic tile works. A greater extent of this expanding and diversified oeuvre makes its way into this curated exhibition and a version of the Power Plant iteration will be presented in the Plug In galleries. Although eschewing any discernible chronology, the exhibition is a great opportunity for audiences to get an intimate sense of the breadth of where Mathieu’s montage of curiosities and critical thought has taken him over the years. It is a welcoming glimpse into his evolution as a painter, the subject matters he keeps revisiting, and the many ways he manifests them in material form. In an interview with Power Plant director, Gaëtane Verna, Mathieu describes encountering his varying works assembled in the single location of this exhibition ‘as walking into my soul’. This illustrates an internal dynamic that is very much personal and felt; one that indexes his own space of imagination, his innate appetite for experimentation, the various states of mind during those moments of production as well as ruminations on topics that held even more significance while at work in the studio. The other side of this dynamic is one that speaks to home. The home within the self that is also the result of an outward ever-complex home. For Mathieu, this place outside of the self is Haiti; its knotty histories and their scarred reverberations in the present. The artist uses his work to respond and meditate on Haiti’s fraught political history and in doing so, situates his personal entanglement in it while broadening the conversation to allow for global collective consciousness. Mathieu often avoids overt symbolism or a one to one depiction while traversing some of these heavy and complex topics. Instead, through the poetry of layers and layers of mark-making, gestural brushwork, and closely considered work titles, he offers us an entryway in. 

In his curatorial essay, Alsaden writes: “Mathieu reminds us that commemorating the tragedies of the past does not fall solely on the shoulders of a nation’s local or diasporic communities, but it is part of our collective responsibility […] underlining common links and struggles that unite us despite national borders, he invites us to enter a world discovered under other skies.”

Manuel Mathieu (b. 1986 in Port-au-Prince, lives and works in Montreal). He received his BFA from Université du Québec à Montréal and his MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Mathieu was an artist in residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2019-20), and the Pamela Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida residency program, Sonoma CA (2019). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2020); HDM Gallery, Beijing (2019); The Armory Show, New York (2018); Tiwani Contemporary, London (2017); and Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2015). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions held in Canada, the United States, and Europe, including Fondation Phi, Montreal (2020); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2019); Frieze London (2018); Art Basel (2017); and Grand Palais, Paris (2014). Mathieu was one of the artists recognized by the 2020 Sobey Art Award.

Amin Alsaden is a curator, educator, and scholar of art and architecture, whose work focuses on transnational solidarities and exchanges across cultural boundaries. With a commitment to advancing social justice through the arts, Alsaden’s curatorial practice contributes to the dissemination of more diverse, inclusive, and global narratives, by decentering and expanding existing canons, and challenging hegemonic knowledge and power structures. He is particularly interested in how artists and architects interrogate collective agency in the public realm and level institutional critique, while envisioning novel visual and spatial responses to the experiences of alienation and belonging. Alsaden’s research explores the history and theory of modern and contemporary art and architecture globally, with specific expertise in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Having taught at several institutions at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, Alsaden regularly serves as an invited lecturer and critic at art, curatorial, and design programs. He teaches at several institutions, and has published and lectured widely.