2023-08-04 11:31:10
Mathieu Cherkit, in the Xippas gallery, in Paris, on July 28, 2023. AUDOIN DESFORGES FOR “THE WORLD”
The first time we looked at a painting by Mathieu Cherkit was at Jean Brolly, who was his first dealer (he is now represented by Renos Xippas). We had already seen some, at the Montrouge show in particular: seen then, but never looked at. We remember it all the more because it was at a fair, the worst place to contemplate a work. That’s also why it stopped us: we weren’t in the glitz or the immediacy that this kind of event usually offers. The painting told us: “Look at me, I am not like the others…”
Indeed, there was nothing seductive about it. No fishnet stockings, no lipstick or teasing smile, but a very thick layer of make-up – in this case, oil paint applied in unreasonable proportions, which sometimes overflowed from the frame as if the paste wanted to escape him. The subject itself – for Cherkit is resolutely figurative – was not the most pleasant either: if he has to paint a nude on a sofa, he forgets the first and concentrates on the second. That he’s going to depict all twisted or askew, because he has a very personal view of the rules of perspective.
When he respects them, it’s the better to overthrow them. Between two work sessions, the sofa has not moved, the nude has been dressed for a long time, understanding that he would never be in the painting, but the painter, when he gets back on the motif, does not does not necessarily adopt its initial position. It can stand a few tens of centimeters away, which is enough to modify the vanishing point. So the sofa is there from a slightly different angle. He paints it as it is. Hence this telescoping of points of view, aggravated from one session to another – they can be spread over several weeks – which allows the board to tell you that it is not like the others.
A different time
To this bizarre space, which Pierre Bonnard would not have disavowed, he adds a different time, which would not displease David Hockney: the drying of oil paint is desperately slow. The landscape before him is more rushed: a painting begun in the fall can be completed in the spring. Hence this curiosity of a tree stripped of its leaves on one side, while its counterpart is greening and budding on the other. “I like to move forward delicately, slowly, but to move forward anyway, he says in his studio in Vallery (Yonne), where he is preparing his next exhibition, scheduled… when the paintings are dry. And then, painting makes me happy. »
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