Mathilde Rosier’s painting, video and sound works invoke agrarian worlds traversed by ritual and seasonal change and the unseen energies that govern the natural order. Champs d’ondes traversant corps fluides [fields of waves passing through fluid bodies] is a solo exhibition at La Borie, the fruit of a two-part residency and immersion in the site and surrounding region. Inspired by springs across the Limousin that are attributed curative powers, the exhibition situates human bodies in relation to more-than-human realms. New and existing works are presented across multiple spaces of the Renaissance castle, imbuing its rational, luminous architecture with vital energy, and mediating between visible and invisible worlds.
In the ground floor exhibition space of La Borie, an airy, capacious salon traversed by light from facing symmetrical windows, Rosier has installed five paintings from her ongoing series Blind Swim (2016-2018). Human-like figures, their faces devoid of features, are clothed in elaborate costumes that evoke the tiered scales and feathers of animals or the voluptuous petals of an exotic flower. Raised on tiptoes with arms elegantly poised, or otherwise inverted, they float against luminous backgrounds, mysterious figures in a dance of ascendance.
Indeed, dance is a recurrent element in Rosier’s work, present in her early videos such as Far from Honolulu (2002) and Abstracting Attraction III (2015), on view in the exhibition, in which two dancers clothed in black and white create a play of symmetry and intersecting forms that slip in and out of perception. The more recent Le massacre du printemps (2020), also on view, borrows from Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 choreography for Le sacre du printemps accompanying Stravinsky’s composition.
As the title suggests, Blind Swim proposes an immersion in a sensory field that moves beyond optical perception. At La Borie, the works are installed free-standing within the space, which she has named “The Ballroom,” like figures in a procession. As such, they invite an engagement that is as much visual as bodily, calling upon us to move about and join them in their courtly choreography.
The second floor space, which Rosier has designated “The Bedroom,” features a series of paintings and installation works. Song Field (2024) consists of two painted panels joined at the centre and installed in a wide v-shape. Rosier has used upholstery fabric instead of canvas, its flower pattern a ghostly presence beneath the painted imagery. Here, pale lines of arrows course along streams of light, a web of currents that ebb and flow in constant circulation. Yellow and pinkish bands akin to arterial canals seem to channel these streams of arrows, creating a fluid, vertinginous sensation. At over two-and-a-half metres in height, the work suggests a portal or threshold opening into an all-encompassing field of energy made visible. Akin to a screen or scenographic device, the theatrical qualities of the work contribute to its capacity to enchant, inviting a suspension of disbelief and transportation to other realms.
The arrow has appeared in Rosier’s work since 2019, a motif she has described as having “arrived on its own” following sustained attempts to capture in paint the wheat fields beside her house in Burgundy. The use of the symbol and overall atmospheric effect recall Paul Klee’s “polyphonic” compositions that pulsate with rhythm and movement. For example, Eros (1923) shows two directional arrows set against a field of intersecting triangles, suggesting desire and sexual union. But where Klee’s use of arrows is limited, Rosier creates a flowing field. The arrows themselves become the substance, the stuff of the world. In constant, restless motion, they are the immaterial flow that surrounds and penetrates us, and can be likened as much to the magnetic and telluric forces of the natural world as to the unfettered rush of data and communications systems.
The suggestion of an immersive energy field made manifest is also present in Lit de rivière [Riverbed] (2024-2026), an installation comprising an unornamented four-poster bed that Rosier found onsite. A cascade of fabric drapes from the canopy rails, painted once again with flowing lines and arrows. Both threshold and passage, the bed becomes, for the artist, the site of liminal states and bodily transmutation, as we pass from wakefulness to dreams, suffer fever-induced hallucinations or attain states of ecstasy. Here, the call to transcend quotidian experience and the limits of our senses thus becomes even stronger. The flowing currents of arrows suggest the gilded rays of Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652)in the throes of religious exultation as she is pierced by divine arrow. Lit de rivière invites such a transformation, a passage to an altered state in which we exceed our bodily limits to gain new forms of perception.
Accompanying the installation works are the paintings Champs d’ondes traversant corps fluide [wave fields passing through fluid body] 1 and 2, with the subtitles Grande Ourse [Ursa Major] and Ver dans le vent [worm in the wind], respectively, from 2026. Combining the luminous, hybrid bodies of Blind Swim with circulating streams of arrows and energy currents, the works inaugurate a new direction in Rosier’s figurative works.
Both paintings feature women in profile, with birdlike features and outstretched arms. They wear wide conical skirts like a resonating bell, or, in the case of Grande Ourse, which is placed upside-down,a funnel that seems to capture the arrows that swirl around her. Outlined in dark blues, her torso and head are covered in a grid-like pattern of squares, with centres that glow like stars. The figure of Ver dans le vent is clothed in a similar undulating grid of squares, rendered in pinkish tones and set against a hazy turquoise background. Her torso is traversed by lines or rays that cross from one side of the canvas to the other. These are radiant, porous bodies, fluid like the rivers that flow beneath the soil and rise to the surface, and like the blood that circulates in our veins.
Completing the ensemble are two portraits of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), an Italian nobleman and philosopher. While his discourse Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) became one of the principal texts of Renaissance humanism, Pico nevertheless espoused esoteric and mystical traditions that imbued the world with symbolism. His approach was syncretic, allowing space for the seemingly limitless capacity of the human intellect while maintaining beliefs in a greater spiritual order, replete with mystery and imagination. His significance, along with other proponents of “hermetic” philosophies, thus attests to the Renaissance as a period where medieval beliefs in an incarnated existence persisted alongside conceptions of a rational, orderly and perceptible world. It is fitting then, that in the Renaissance setting of La Borie, Pico acts as a kind of spiritual guide or totemic figure, manifesting a world traversed by mystery.
Rosier’s works are based on a portrait of the scholar held in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Seen in profile, Pico wears robes and a deep red hat. His hair falls to his shoulders in curls that resemble waves or the fronds of a fern unfurling. In Rosier’s works, the hat is elongated to cover part of his face, suggesting a bird’s head and pointed beak. The strands of his hair become curving, parallel lines that flow like snakes or rivers beyond the edge of the canvas.
Finally, the film works Abstracting Attraction III and Le massacre du printemps are presented in an adjacent building named by Rosier “The Cinema” for the purposes of the exhibition. The artist’s approach to film shares much with her paintings, where the image becomes an almost tactile surface of superimposed layers. Similarly, the sound is not mere accompaniment to visual imagery but an aural landscape that envelopes the viewer. In Le massacre du printemps, superimposed strains of Sibelius symphonies are punctuated by recurrent percussive beats and cicadas pulsing out their habitual rhythms, which gain in intensity but are without resolution, creating instead a state of suspension.
The dancers’ masks in the film resemble heads of wheat where individual kernels are replaced by eyes. These are creatures with enhanced vision – plant seers – whose movements suggest forgotten agrarian rituals, or perhaps a potentially ominous signalling to humans, who remain ignorant of their sacrifice.
* * *
Mathilde Rosier’s practice can be situated in a lineage of artists who have grappled with spirituality and unconscious realms, from Kandinsky and Klee to Agnes Martin, Hilma af Klint and Leonora Carrington. The latter two, along with Swiss healer and artist Emma Kunz, whose large-scale diagrammatic abstractions suggest an extrasensory engagement with nature and the cosmos, have been the subject of renewed interest in recent years.
What distinguishes Rosier from this artistic heritage is her attention to landscape and natural phenomena as means to access realms beyond the immediate material world. In this way, her work performs the role of a shaman or sorcerer, who, as ecologist and philosopher David Abram writes, “cultivates an ability to shift out of his or her common state of consciousness precisely in order to make contact with the other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human existence is intertwined…”
As evident in Champs d’ondes traversant corps fluids, the body itself becomes a site of transformation, achieved through a porousness in relation to the surrounding environment. This multisensory engagement with the world suggests a phenomenological approach that situates our experience as entangled within a field of sensations that transcend the visible.
In foregrounding forces that fall outside the realm of empirical existence – from telluric currents to healing waters – Rosier cultivates a deeper engagement with the natural world as a place of mystery. Her works speak to the fissure between previous conceptions of an animate, symbolic world and a quantifiable and thus exploitable planet. Instead, she advocates for a kind of rewilding of binary thinking and extractivist logics set into motion from the Renaissance on, and which find their pinnacle in 21st-century capitalism.
Rosier’s work calls for a rebalancing, an attunement with the natural world, in order to rectify, or indeed, heal, the systemic imbalance between humans and the environment, reminding us that we are enmeshed and contiguous within its dense field of energies.
