Matthieu Darrasse, artiste
Painter · From life · Performance
Each project starts with a simple question. What if we froze the sunset, as in the French children's game 1, 2, 3, soleil, our Red Light, Green Light? What if the great orators had painted while they spoke? What if the pedestrian crossings of Paris started to think? What if a sailing boat became a studio for a year? Once the question is asked, each project has its own rules of the game: three pastels side by side, an orator's gestures replayed on the canvas, one sentence per crossing, one work per day at sea. And when the tool is missing, I make it.
Like the French children's game 1, 2, 3, soleil, our Red Light, Green Light, where the word for sun is the signal to freeze, I hold the sunset still. Three times, from life, in dry pastel from La Maison du Pastel, across the hour and a half that leads to nautical twilight. Side by side, the three panels show what one alone cannot: there are several sunsets inside a single sunset.
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What if the great orators held brushes while they spoke? I learn their gestures by heart, then, like a pantomime show, I mime their gestures facing the canvas, wearing the brush-gloves. What remains is their imprint, and it is enough to get a sense of the speech without knowing who gave it.
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American pedestrian signals say WALK or DON'T WALK. In Paris, in 2003, the crossings said THINK, DON'T THINK. Every night, large letter stencils were rolled out over the white bars and the letters spray-painted: the crossings became lines of writing, one sentence chosen for each place. Filmed the next day, passers-by stopped and wondered what it meant. Published in Eye Magazine, the international reference for graphic design.
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In the nineteenth century, painters completed their training with the Grand Tour, a journey across Europe down to Italy. Mine will be on the water: a solo tour of the Atlantic, aboard a ketch turned into a studio, to paint every day from life. Open air on the open sea. My father dreamt of sailing away on a long voyage; he chose instead to keep his own father's house, Ker Mab, Breton for the son's house. My boat will be called Bag Mab, the son's boat, and this tour I will also make for him, for the dream he left at the quay. Each canvas belongs to one day of the voyage: soon, anyone will be able to reserve theirs. Departure from Concarneau, in 2030.
Website in progress, 2026 Follow the voyage →
I already had an artistic practice as a child, long before Penninghen. The school, heir to the Académie Julian, gave me the rigour of the creative trade, which I have kept as an art director. Much later, art history at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne gave me the references: not to learn how to paint, but to know the painters and movements that came before me, and those painting today.
Alongside this, I am a gallerist, with L'Admoniteur, and a painting restorer. Looking at works all day long, appraising them, restoring them, is a school for the eye: you decipher each painter's colour and gesture from very close, and you end up looking at your own canvases with the same eyes. Not forgetting the joy of wandering through the rooms of the Louvre and copying the masters there.
Let's talk: a work, a commission, an exhibition.