Sylvain Mathieu was born in Gien, centre region, France in 1973. Self-taught, he explored different materials from his first paintings and during 20 years he looked into various painting processes using pigment, soil, fire, and oil. 

“I’ve always been amazed by the traces of mankind and the oxidized stones. Life is in the leftover.”

Sylvain Mathieu uses nature and our remainings to give the general architecture, the frame to every art piece on which he applies his oxide and vegetal tannins. He has always been focussing on the understanding of oxidation in all aspects. He finally got rid of the classic mediums to rise up his artwork and master a unique technique which brings the extraordinary natural emergence of colour and unprecedented depth on the canvas.

“The oxide which usually destroys brings back to life”

He gathers and assembles abandoned items from our past, what was left on the side of the road, and make it rise from the depth of its silence. Psychologist, painter, poet, he’s always been working with isolated and excluded people, in pain and sorrow. He has ever been trying to bring them back to life as well.

“Anything we build, cities, ideologies, religions, traditions, are meant to evolve or leave a trace in perpetual motion.”

To the artist, as fragile as lace, what might seem very solid, stable and balanced, in a second can collapse and leave just a single print. As the leftover is silent and desperately remaining still, Sylvain Mathieu makes it rise again. Genuinely concerned by conflicts, by the human condition, he shows that anything we’ve ever built, mentally or as an actual realization, is very fragile…

“I build my world as I would build a hut, those ones children like to get in and share stories, create fantastic universes.”

Sylvain Mathieu gives renaissance to whatever seems to be lost, abandoned or destroyed by human being and time. He revives its core and gives it a brand new momentum.