Matisse Mesnil (1989, Castiglion Fiorentino) lives and works in Paris. His work takes the form of a research process: initially focused on challenging the Albertian paradigm of painting, which describes it as a window to the world, Matisse began to expand the work to focus on the frame. “We must approach differently,” said Jacques Derrida; that is, to make the parergon (“aside,” “in addition,” or “outside the work”) become the ergon (the work itself). By thus focusing on what deviates from the work, the artist has engaged in a phase of technical and methodological experimentation specific to his new favorite material, metal. Between craftsmanship and industry, this requires an adjustment of gesture, temporality, tools. This phase of experimentation has induced a slow derivation, like a return to the royal road of artistic practice: figuration. The work on the frame and margins, which hollowed out the work and left only a vaporous, removable image, has produced, over the course of practice, the return of representation. Matisse Mesnil, with industrial techniques such as welding or grinding, re-enacts the means of figuration, in its most used genres, such as landscape or still life. To the noisy world of industry is thus attached the ethic and aesthetic of silent contemplation that runs through the history of the landscape. A mute violence underlies his latest pieces, which yet call for a form of religiosity that must also be read in the scenographic and architectural exigency that governs his work: the works of Matisse Mesnil, from their format to their mode of presentation, are made to be approached in space and to the scale of their viewers.
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