Mathieu Cherkit — Galerie Xippas
By pushing the focus to its most intimate point, Mathieu Cherkit touches upon a shared interiority, letting affects slip freely, guided by our own visions—from the gentle quiet of the home to the bitter repetition of confinement. A highly convincing new exhibition is presented at the Xippas Gallery.
Mathieu Cherkit — Always on My Mind @ Xippas Gallery from September 6 to October 15. Learn more Known for his pictorial work devoted to his immediate domestic environment, Mathieu Cherkit plays with geography through time. Possible temporalities sustain one another, while contexts, moments, and social markers unfold in fragments: the imprint of a computer, the order of an interior, the mark of a product. In his figurative arrangements, abstraction emerges in layers; materials overlap with an impossible coherence, the substance of paint itself—through its volume—rendering the fissures of the world.
For while painting is indeed the central subject here, its complexity and richness echo—through a shade, through a reflection—the shifting modulations of feeling it sets free. This mirror, then, which is not our own, gradually becomes throughout the exhibition a window onto a shared world, singularly inhabited.
These new canvases, oscillating between the persistence of already-worked places and the exploration of uncharted territories, testify to a relation to space that is influenced yet never fixed. The insolent vibration of a yellow, the accumulation—or absence—of utensils, flashes of life torn from the everyday, displaced, recomposed: to inhabit a place is not the privilege of those who reside there. And fantasy, repetition through painting, remembrance—these become ways of enlivening a tradition deeply rooted in art history: interior painting, here heightened by a constitutive ambiguity.
This work of immediate projection—almost of plastic reflection—materializes in the very thickness of the paint. Sedimented layers form a plastic topography where the painterly gesture becomes the concrete trace of time passed. Here and there, aberrations carve into the material, giving it a second life, like intrusive tags on an image already exposed to others. Far from simple figuration, the volumes and impastos spill over the canvas, asserting that painting does not merely represent: it constructs a material in its own right, an interior turned outward into a public panel, a shared furniture.
Thus, Cherkit’s work blurs the boundaries between figuration and abstraction. A kitchen is read less as a narrative space than as the reflections dancing within it; a staircase recounts a desire for flat surfaces and lines, for painterly substance that, in turn, inhabits the daily spectacle, where the image contaminates its model; the garden is the edge of a landscape, of which one finds another iteration in a striking painting stripped of all construction.
In this tension between the intimate and the elsewhere, the horizon opens and, at times, we step outside the house. But the departure is never absolute; perspectives remain tortuous, like the view onto the street that seems to require a contortion to be glimpsed—perhaps from the first floor. Elsewhere, the reading—free yet consistent—always maintains its coherence: the house remains the magnetic pole of the composition. Everything returns to it; it turns everything back, as it has already arranged it all.
