DIVING BLUE

Pierre Mathéus was born in 1977 in Deauville. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2002, he lives and works in Paris.

What does painting tell us? This fundamental question underpins Pierre Mathéus’s artistic research, as he likes to consider painting as an entity that at times remains concealed, at others reveals itself to us. It is this intrinsic duality of expression — what is said also contains what is left unsaid — that already characterised his previous body of work, Tabloïds: large-scale figurative formats which, through a pictorial technique playing on emptiness and fullness, black and white, led us to the thresholds of abstraction, offering a lens through which to observe our contemporary societies.

This approach to a painting that gradually reveals itself is taken further in the Diving Blue series, pushed towards complete abstraction and guided by a process stripped of all discourse other than that of painting itself.

Diving Blue is less a series about colour — blue being, for Pierre Mathéus, the light of black — than an exploration of form. Much like a jazz musician, a genre that accompanies the artist’s practice, he submits himself to a discipline in which the repetition of gesture becomes the condition for both freedom and surprise.

This plunge into abstraction is guided by the emergence of white cut through by the depths of blue, by the absorption of the material across the different papers used, by the emanations released by blue ink and by the brass tones of free jazz.

Mestiers will present thirty-seven works from the Diving Blue series at 9 rue Francoeur, 75018 Paris, including several formats of ink on paper as well as acrylics on canvas.