Mathieu Piffeteau

Small Mars, Tribute to James Turrell by Mathieu Piffeteau - Installation, light

2020

Mathieu Piffeteau was born in Nantes in 1982 to a surrealist painter mother and a topographer father. Certain family visits to museums had a profound effect on the young artist: he marvelled at the imaginative power of Salvador Dalí at the theatre-museum in Figueras and was amazed by the incredible optical illusions of Victor Vasarely at the eponymous Foundation in Aix-en-Provence. At the same time, he admired the perfection of his father’s drawings at home, developing his own taste for precision and geometry. The shapes on which his canvases are based are now created with the compasses and rulers of his topographer father. Mathieu Piffeteau has been a self-taught painter since the age of 20. However, his work at the time had nothing in common with today’s: figurative, rapid and instinctive, it was an outlet for his feelings about injustice and violence in society. After completing a master’s degree in sociology, he moved to Australia to live in the Aboriginal community of Wugularr (Beswick). There, he took part in the production of works that were halfway between art and craft, and he was marked by this extremely repetitive and time-consuming traditional painting, subject to strict codes. Back in France, he moved to Biarritz to pursue his passion for surfing and worked in the construction industry as a rope access technician. Following an accident at work in 2018, he decided to devote himself to painting and joined a collective studio. A feeling of powerlessness and frustration in the face of the problems of our world led him to abandon figurative representation. Mathieu Piffeteau became interested in light and optical effects, subjects on which he would later focus his artistic research. Motivated by a strong desire to exhibit his contemporary paintings in a public place, he prepared a very ambitious personal project to show his works in the Sainte-Eugénie crypt in Biarritz. Four years later, in 2023, he inaugurated his first solo exhibition with 53 canvases of various sizes created especially for the spaces of this fascinating venue. Between gallery exhibitions and increasingly immersive installation projects, the contemporary painter continues to question the role of the artist, his relationship with the observer, and the impact of our culture and society on contemporary art. “It’s not about intellectual representation, but a sensitive approach. My intention is to create a sensation by mixing shapes and colours.”