Matthieu Palud — Les Bains-Douches, Alençon
At times evasive, at times fixed, the eyes of painter Matthieu Palud’s subjects seem to mirror the wanderings of his own gaze upon painting itself, its diversions and detours. Les Bains-Douches in Alençon presents a solo exhibition of the artist’s work.
Restrained and airy, the selection of works presented at Les Bains-Douches d’Alençon allows space for silence and humility—compositions that capture a suspended breath of our time, as if neutralized by a kind of apathy. In this almost conceptual sobriety, the manner changes but the displacement remains: still lifes, interiors, portraits, each subject calls for a gesture, a technique, and a unique form of representation that makes the painter’s practice itself, and its enactment, an ever-renewed challenge of representation. Hence, perhaps, that vibration (changing yet repeated in each work) of a central subject charged with the artist’s will and desire to shift its existence onto the canvas, even at the cost of neutralizing its surroundings. In his interiors, all escape seems futile; in his portraits, other possible lives (symbolized by the windows) become mere motifs within an architecture that itself might dissolve into the body.
The composition seems to free itself, and creation asserts its hold over the creator. Technique, now a true subject of reflection, becomes part of the struggle waged in every new painting. The exhibition itself, or should we say the spatial arrangement of his latest works comes to embody this suspension, symbolically embracing its own physical reality.
Thus time (“recent”), as the first quality of his works, becomes the central subject of an exhibition that, ultimately, appears as a breath, a space of reckoning, where every image bears witness to the battles fought with painting.
