Albada Jelgersma Gallery is pleased to announce Mathieu Cherkit’s second solo exhibition in the gallery, Cache-Cache. The exhibition will open Saturday, September 7, from 5-7pm in presence of the artist.
Mathieu Cherkit has moved! For anyone who is familiar with his work, this is important news as the artist paints his home surroundings. Usually void of the people living in the house, one senses their presence, hence the title “Cache-Cache,” French for “Hide and Seek”. In his second exhibition at the gallery he comes out with the very first paintings of his new environment. Since he made a series of 190 paintings of his old house in the past 10 years, these paintings undoubtedly augur the beginning of a new long series.
For Mathieu Cherkit (Paris, 1982) the look inward and the constant return to the same subject are a form of research; he wants to extract himself from the imitation so that he can focus on the painting itself. By painting his own environment over and over again he brings about a singular pictorial universe. Familiar as he is with his subject, he can play with the light, draws attention to everyday objects rendering them intriguing somehow, and introduces puzzling perspectives and abstractions. New is the extended frame of one large painting: by adding triangular shapes to the corners of the painting he creates a surprising depth in the painting and with that a work unseen before.
Frank Reijnders (art historian) observed in the first exhibition at the gallery that Cherkit’s paintings “are a feast of brilliant colors with thick layers of paint pouring over the edges. Here is a real painter at work.” Mathieu Cherkit places himself in the tradition of Van Gogh, Hockney, Matisse and the Leipziger School (he studied at the Leipzig academy) and shows that in his use of colors and in choosing his own house as his subject. Yet, he has clearly developed his own pictorial universe, his own intense way of painting, and demonstrates with this new series that his research takes him to ever-new places, to new perspectives, and to increasingly intimate paintings.
