Passionate about Art and Africa, Mathieu has a strong artistic connection with Africa, he participated in the Dakar Biennale 2022 - Collective Exhibition Marché International des Arts de Dakar. He was also the guest of honor at the inauguration of the International Center for Contemporary Art and Cultures in Dakar in 2021.
The artist aims to catalyze his vision of African heritage through the prism of music, fashion, design and dance, his favorite themes. He tends to design colorful and expressive work using the medium of fabric, very popular in Africa, whose traditional motifs embody the very essence of African identities. For the artist, textiles alone bring together numerous meanings: traditional ceremonies, weddings, dances, music.
For his work he uses the folding technique (braiding, matting, weaving) to transform the Wax fabric, worn throughout Africa and already widely distributed internationally, the Bazin, worn mainly in west Africa, Bogolan, dyed with earth from Mali using an ancestral method, or even Indigo, Kente from Ghana. So many fabrics that allow him to create a veritable platform of colors, enriched with countless printed patterns, resulting in an infinite number of combinations of shapes.
Through his work, Mathieu wishes to express his story of friendship with ancestral Africa by making it resonate in the contemporaneity of an Africa which is growing, transforming, emancipating itself and spreading throughout the world, an Africa rich in customs and flourishing of its innovative youth.
The work of Mathieu Josset, because it is work in the sense of a process of design and interpretation of ancestral traditional know-how. A dialogue, a humble tribute to the work of weavers. Those who share time, life, culture and heritage in their artifact.
Mathieu Josset's works are gestures and sensations, frame and perspectives, memory and possibility.
The gesture of folding calls upon volume, material and textures. Through this relationship with the artist's intention and its execution, sensations arise. From the one who hunts, feels, transforms and composes with the fabric. Of those who look, step back, approach, put into perspective and abandon themselves to the repetitive patterns to reimagine the sensation of the pieces fixed on the canvas.
Each detail of the work, each knot, each fold is an entity in its own right. In this way, the artist questions the notion of work through the craftsmanship of fabric and its patterns.
Long time ago since then I wanted to transmit part of the emotions I have felt throughout my journey and which made me fall in love with this magical land. Starting with photography in a fist time, I started one year and a half ago a personal original artistic project with African and carribean fabric. Fabric is for me the symbol of this colorful, vibrant African life. Its traditional patterns represent the roots of the African culture.
I use wax, bazin and madras fabric to create an exciting color palette. The folding technique I have devised is reminiscent of sea waves or chieftaincies' roofs, and bring pep to my work.
It also allows me to make these patterns my own and to create new ones.
I wish to tell ancestral tales as well as contemporary stories, stories of an ever-growing Africa, transforming and conquering the world, rich from its traditions and from its innovative youth.
My work also depicts the challenges the african people have to overcome everyday: the fights for equality and freedom, the hope for prosperity and their identity seeking.
Travelling is the main catalyst for all of my inspirations, and I wish to cover every aspect of it: the quest, the wandering, the detours, the shortcuts; the waves, the heat, the cold, the danger.
My second land at heart is the West Indies, beyond their fine sand and their islands' turquoise water, since I fell in love with their music, traditional dances, and their one-of-a-kind carnival celebrations.
I have participated this year to severals contemporary art expositions and competitions as of Miramar competition in Cannes (France) last June where I have been awarded 1st prize for figurative art work ("Black beauty") and in Monaco for GemlucArt international competition end of September.
I'll participate to Dak'art in June 2020 (Dakar, Senegal).
