MATHILDE DENIZE Française, b. 1986

The paintings, sculptures, and installations of Mathilde Denize result from simple gestures, collections of humble materials, perpetual movements, and mutations. This economy of means implies an intuitive approach based on modesty.

It all begins with the desire to paint and represent the human genre. A task that Mathilde Denize undertakes while training in the painting studio of Djamel Tatah at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. Gradually, she opens her practice to the collection of objects, fragments that constitute a repertoire of materials, textures, shapes, and colors. These objects are battered, incomplete, and decontextualized. They carry silent and intangible stories that the artist endeavors to make visible. In her studio, they are arranged on shelves, hidden in boxes, or presented on the floor, on pedestals, or even hung on walls. A carved stone, a piece of fabric, a dried lemon, plant leaves, a hat form, a black and white photograph, a sample of wallpaper. Their gathering in the same space leads to a multitude of formal experiments, where she juxtaposes or fits each element using a nail, a rubber band, or a knotted wool string. The gestures respect the integrity of the original object: sliding a photograph between two stones, placing a clementine peel on a piece of wood, inserting a plaster form into a box. The assemblies take the form of mysterious pagan totems or altars.

THE LITTLE THINGS OF DAILY LIFE

These objects form the elements of a language that Mathilde Denize constructs and deconstructs over time: an intuitive, physical, formal, and memorial language inheriting from artistic practices of historical movements such as land art and arte povera, but also from artists like Robert Filliou, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, or Joseph Beuys. By seizing the little things of daily life, she generates works that reflect on time, the body, memory, presence, and absence. Issues related to strata, variation, metamorphosis, repair, and movement. Mathilde Denize's plastic language escapes fixity, rules, or any system. Initially, in volumetric representation, the works were entirely conceived from collected objects and presented as ready-mades. The artist gradually incorporates elements that she creates: castings of mouths in concrete, sculptures in glazed ceramic or painted wood. The observation of fragments has led to their transposition into new materials or other supports. In this sense, painting has regained an important place in her creative process. Goodbye to the human figure, goodbye to the battle. The paintings on canvas are governed by color, light, and the presence of object-motifs, indeterminate forms. Mathilde Denize creates different planes to structure her compositions and provide support for her still lifes, her enigmatic ex-votos. Older paintings are also recycled and become a material in their own right. The artist cuts human silhouettes directly from painted canvases, leaving only the clothes: a shirt, pants, swimsuits. The pictorial and sculptural extractions result in high-relief works in which the object and the painting are hybridized, reconciled.

Mathilde Denize's work attests to an impossibility to represent the world in a full, total, and fixed manner. Sculptures and paintings are subject to multiple transformations, displacements, and recyclings. One work hides another in the making. From one exhibition to another, the artist "performs" her works by modifying their "original" state, a passing state, in transition. With a sensitive and modest approach, she questions what, in the work of art, holds authority: its final state, value, temporality, and conservation, as well as a widespread desire for demonstration and spectacle that has animated the art world since the late 20th century. Instead of grand effects, she favors small means, fragments of anonymous stories, non-events, snippets of memories that we will have to reconstruct or fabricate. While Mathilde Denize's works reveal little about her personal history, they invest in other territories: the ephemeral, uncertainty, modesty, incompleteness, and discretion. In this way, they represent a mode of personal expression. The result is a very free plastic language that engages in a delicate and sincere reflection on the history and present of a world in which notions of truth, certainty, and trust waver not without violence. It is this movement, marked by unease and immense freedom, that she continues to implement to redefine possibilities.

Julie Crenn, artpress, 2017