Mathilde
Verdin

The work of Mathilde Verdin originates in five centuries of genealogy, rooted in the same plot of Breton land. Her approach to Brittany implies an intimate regard, elevating it to the status of a living organism, more than a material territorial entity to be documented. A sacred place where the historical vestiges of human memory recur cyclically, an almost mystical accumulation of the traces our ancestors left behind as they passed through this shared place. She thus creates a Breton memory within her artistic work, making her native land far more than a mere backdrop: a reserve of presence of those who are no more.

Her practice is built on listening. The human being becomes a sensitive antenna, able to receive atmospheres and to feel the presences and invisible memories that inhabit places.

She places herself in a position of reception that is almost mediumistic — not in the sense of communicating with the dead, but turned toward an extreme attention to residual presences.

By “inner mini-film”, she means the atmosphere from which the light emitted by objects, places and beings emanates, even after they have gone. This is her definition of mourning.

Her choice to depict bodies from behind, a hallmark of her formal vocabulary, is a chosen constraint. The absence of a face is not meant to negate the idea of showing, but on the contrary to bring to the fore the one who listens to what the place has to tell. By erasing the features, she opens a space of projection for anyone to settle into this space and take possession of this body emptied of identity.

Whether it is a forgotten chapel, empty domestic spaces or objects one cannot throw away, the Breton territory is here the main actor of her approach, through its language, its landscapes, its rites and above all its capacity to preserve a presence in the form of a trace. This is the logic applied in her exchanges between painting and sculpture, where one learns to look and the other to solidify space. A lived landscape then becomes a relic, even matter bearing the absence of a body, making her artistic exploration an archaeology of ordinary mourning.

Mathilde Verdin uses her works as tools to answer two great questions she asks herself: “How does a territory keep the memory of the beings who have crossed it?” And “How does the landscape cease to be a backdrop and become an entity that preserves, acts, and transforms those who live there and those who have disappeared?”

Threshold. Passage. The body becomes a ferryman. And the work, the residue of this crossing.