Threads of cotton on canvas
Unique piece
2021
Mathieu Ducournau was born in Morocco and lives and works in Paris. Intuitive and out of the ordinary artist, he explores alone the possibilities of painting before meeting the thread and the potential of the sewing machine. Mathieu Ducournau plays with the figurative and abstraction. An atypical artist, he chooses thread as the preferred medium of his artistic expression. Whether this thread is mishandled by his sewing machine or freely twirled to the canvas, like an embroidery, the thread is conductive, revealing a line, a look, a smile... On the one hand, there are topographies, which are like abstract reliefs where everyone can see what they want to see... and on the other hand, portraits. The theme of the portrait is part of a pictorial tradition but little by little, the motif will migrate, detach itself, like a contemporary Shroud ! With the Anonymous series, the artist transfigures every detail, until he brings out the personality of the model. Then the artist continues the exploration of the representation of the portrait through the ages, with some great figures of the collective memory. From Velázquez to Vinci, from Rembrandt to El Greco, passing through the contemporary icon: the emoticon. References and tributes parade past. Like mirages, these portraits transport us with their special, almost ghostly presence. Portraits from memory, it is no longer we who look at the Mona Lisa or the Menin, but they who look at us. The threads used like dry paint, mixing and superimposing, make these faces appear as if they were in three dimensions. From a blurred appearance, they only become more real, more alive!