Manuel Mathieu (born October 1986) is a Haitian contemporary visual artist recognized as a painter of abstract works that suggest figurative forms within ambiguous spaces. Mathieu draws from Haitian visual cultures and from Western art movements such as expressionism and existentialism. His practice weaves together formal techniques, Haitian contemporary art movements to explore phenomenologies of human relations as they relate to power dynamics, loyalty, love, nature, subjective experience, history writing. Mathieu’s work reflects on the intersection of individual and historical identity, examining how personal histories resonate within larger socio-political contexts.
Early life and education
Manuel Mathieu was born Ayizan Pierre Manuel Mathieu on October 9, 1986, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Both his parents are Haitian and raised their children with high expectations of educational achievements. His father Philippe Mathieu is an agronomist while his mother has a Phd in psychology. He has two younger sisters that both reside in Canada. When he was 15, he got closer to his cousin and groundbreaking Haitian artist Mario Benjamin. He often went to his house, a space full of magazines, art catalogues, and sculptures. There, at Benjamin’s house, he became acquainted with artists that influenced his own work, trailblazers such as Mona Hatoum and Clyfford Still.
When he was 19, Mathieu moved to Quebec, into his grandmother's house who had emigrated to Canada with her children, without her husband, a colonel under Jean Claude Duvalier's dictatorial regime. His parents associated Mathieu's artistic exploration to his struggles. When he moved to Blainville, Quebec, he began painting, as well as doing photography and video art more intensely with the support of his grandmother.
In 2016, he obtained a Master of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, England. Since his graduation, Manuel has become a sought-after artist with international representation by art galleries Pilar Corrias, in London, Hugues Charbonneau, in Montreal, and HDM gallery in Beijing, China.
Artistic influence and style
In 2016, one year into his postgraduate program at Goldsmiths, Mathieu was involved in a near-fatal motorbike hit-and-run. He suffered a severe concussion, facial trauma, fractures of his jaw, and short-term memory loss. This experience influenced the subject of his MFA thesis show “One future.” After his physical recovery and no more visible traces of his accident, he wanted to express what lingered innately. He found a correlation between his invisible trauma and that of his country after the Duvalier dictatorship. “One Future” explored the Duvalier regime in order to address the national trauma that was scarcely being addressed in collective settings. The accident also drew him closer to his family and consolidated his friendships. Many of Manuel’s portraits are of his immediate circle.
Deconstructive processes shape the overarching themes of Mathieu’s work, as he develops a visual language that pushes the confines of representational depictions and what is considered figurative. He extrapolates abstract formal techniques to portray historical Haitian figures and subject matters, creating a visual language that indicates his point-of-view through interpretative considerations. The textural, compositional, and thematic transparency in Mathieu’s work underscore his practice and deep concern to uncover the power and spiritual structures behind modes of thinking, of behaving and manifesting realities. Recent critical essays have highlighted his ability to blend texture, composition, and transparency, emphasizing how his practice reveals the power dynamics and spiritual structures underlying human thought, behavior, and reality.Gagosian. Social works II: Manuel Mathieu The Delusion of Power https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2021/11/29/essay-social-works-ii-manuel-mathieu-delusion-power/
His paintings often re-stage archived materials such as videos and photographs to bring forth the fact of erasure, of invisibility and the consequent curiosity and questions that arise in the face of narrational voids. His work interrogates the gaps and silences in historical narratives, particularly those imposed on the Black diaspora through colonialism and marginalization. This approach has been celebrated in several recent articles where critics have praised Mathieu’s ability to bring forth narratives that question official histories while amplifying collective memories of trauma and resistance.Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2020. MANUEL MATHIEU: SURVIVANCE Paintings of powerful, haunting, irrepressible beauty.https://artguide.artforum.com/uploads/guide.005/id24100/press_release.pdf
As a multidisciplinary artist, he draws from various musical practices— jazz improvisation and repetition— and material processes that allow him to expand and diversify his approach on a subject matter that he explores years on end. Mathieu consistently refers Haitian visual cultures of religious hybridity such as in The Poto-Mitan movement, ecology, nature as it appears in other movements like Saint Soleil, which further broaden his multidisciplinary approach .
Reviews of his exhibitions, particularly those showcasing Pendulum, have noted the project’s emotional resonance and conceptual depth. The work has been described as a critical turning point in Mathieu’s career, reflecting his expanded exploration of history, trauma, and spiritual resilience. These exhibitions, held at prestigious venues like The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Miami, have solidified Mathieu’s reputation as an artist who transcends traditional forms and themes, creating work that resonates with both personal and collective histories.Toronto Biennial of Art, 2024. https://torontobiennial.org/exhibition/pendulum/
Drawings and other media Mathieu's official website, https://www.manuelmathieu.com/, serves as a portal to his multifaceted artistic practice. Beyond painting, Mathieu explores various media, including drawing, textile, video, and installation art. His drawings, often created on a smaller scale than his paintings, have been instrumental in triggering breakthroughs in his painting technique, offering a space for experimentation and the development of new ideas.
His short films push the boundaries of conceptual narration in his perpetual study of how beliefs, and history informs our perspectives and our reactions to political and/or intimate events. One of Mathieu’s most celebrated film projects, Pendulum (2023), exemplifies this multidisciplinary approach. The project has been exhibited internationally and has garnered significant recognition, earning Mathieu the Best Short Film Award from the International Festival of Films on Art. Pendulum has been featured in major exhibitions in venues such as the Power Plant Contemporary Art, the Gallery TPW in Toronto, the Saint-Louis Art Museum, the Perez Art Museum in Miami and the Museum of Contemporary Art Miami.
Olfaction Since the early 2020s, scent has become a recurring element within Mathieu's multidisciplinary practice, extending his work in painting, sculpture, ceramics, mosaic, and film into an explicitly non-visual olfactory register. Mathieu has described smell as one of the most powerful and spiritual of the senses, linking it to memory, ritual, and the body's relationship to what is absent or invisible.
This dimension of his work was foregrounded in Unity in Darkness, Mathieu's most extensive institutional exhibition to date, presented at the PHI in Montreal (October 2025 – March 2026) and curated by Cheryl Sim. It included Ciel et Terre ("Sky and Earth"), his first dedicated olfactory installation: a tent-like structure enveloping visitors in a custom-formulated scent, conceived as an extension of "the aura and the absent body." Sim framed the piece within perfume's longer history in spiritual ritual "to purify and to protect" as a way of connecting individual bodies through shared sensory experience.
Mathieu extended this approach to Pendulum, a short film first produced in 2023, that won the first prize of the 2024 International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA), and earlier presented as a film and sculptural installation at the Toronto Biennial (2024). For the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2026) titled In Minor Keys, realized posthumously from a concept by curator Koyo Kouoh, the first African woman to curate the exhibition, Mathieu reconceived Pendulum as an immersive installation combining the film with fabric sculpture and a scent developed with Mazen Nasri and perfumer Juliette Karagueuzoglou. The diffused, camphorous scent was designed to underscore the film's narrative of a woman transmitting a spiritual legacy to a group of men, reinforcing its themes of intimacy and historical strength. Of the scent's role, Mathieu said: "Scent disperses gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, and then begins to occupy the altar. The piece is not only the objects you see, but the invisible atmosphere that forms between them."
Selected exhibitions
Solo 2026 - Ayizan, Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris, France 2026 - Perineum, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montréal, Canada 2025 - Unité dans la noirceur/Unity In Darkness, PHI, Montréal, Canada 2025 - Bury Your Masters, Pilar Corrias, London, UK 2025 - Pendulum, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri, USA 2024 - Dwelling on the Invisible, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, USA 2024 - World Discovered Under Other Skies, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, USA 2024 - The End of Figuration, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK 2023 - Rising From the Ashes, K11 Art Foundations, Shanghai, Wuhan and Shenyang, China 2023 - World Discovered Under Other Skies, Owens Art Gallery, Sackville, Canada 2022 - Dear mélancolie, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montréal, Canada 2022 - Keeping Things Whole, Pilar Corrias, London, UK 2022 - Silk Road Traveler, Lethe’s wanderer, Fondation Longlati, Shanghai, China 2022 - World Discovered Under Other Skies, ICA Plug In, Winnipeg, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada 2021 - Son of Voodoo, HdM Gallery, Beijing, China 2021 - Build Within You, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, USA 2021 - Negroland: A Landscape of Desires, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, USA 2020 - World Discovered Under Other Skies, The Power Plant Contemporary, Toronto, Canada 2020 - Survivance, Montreal Museum of Fine arts, Montreal, Canada 2019 - Wu ji, HDM Gallery, Beijing, China 2018 - The Spell on You, Maruani Mercier, Brussels, Belgium 2018 - Nobody is watching, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, USA 2017 - Truth to Power, Tiwani Contemporary Gallery, London, UK 2017 - Art Brussels, Maruani Mercier, Brussels, Belgium 2016 - One Future, Goldsmiths Graduating Show, UK 2012 - Prémices / Open-Ended, Montréal, arts interculturels, Montreal, Canada
Group 2026 - 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Italia 2026 - in relation to stillness, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, USA 2025 - Seoul Mediacity Biennale, South Korea 2025 - The Abstract Future, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, USA 2025 - Time Isn’t Real, Art Gallery of Burlington, USA 2024 - Launching A New Era, Yuan ART MUSEUM, Beijing, China 2024 - Toronto Biennial of Art: Precarious Joys, TPW Gallery, Toronto, Canada 2024 - Abstraction (re)creation, Consortium Museum, Dijon, France 2024 - Soft Power, DAS MINSK Kunsthaus, Potsdam, Allemagne 2024 - Ré-enchantement, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France 2024 - Les doigts dans la terre, les yeux vers le ciel, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montréal, Canada 2023 - Riopelle, à la croisée des temps, Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa, Canada 2023 - SHIFT: Ecologies of Fashion, Form + Textile, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada