Born 1972 in Marseilles, France
Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia
Mathieu Briand makes installations, sculptures that use light, video, sound, and other media to let viewers destabilize and manipulate into new zones of spatial and temporal perceptions.
Mathieu Briand gives us no peace. He stirs up our senses, our perceptions. He plays havoc with the rules, subverts our relationships with space and objects, and turns viewpoints upside down.
His installations are confrontations us with intermediate spaces, situated somewhere between perceptive reality and a displacement of the imagination. After holding a large-scale solo exhibition in two parts at palais de Tokyo Paris and Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon in 2004, he has extended the range of creation to experience-type installations with a project named : Ubïq : A Mental Odyssey.
This ambitious time-space realisation was mounted for the first time in 2006 at the Los Angeles REDCAT Theater and later at MIT List Visual Center, Tate Modern , Art Basel Unlimited to finished in 2009 at TEA on the island of Tenerife. In between, from January 2007 till January 2008, the gallery Maisonneuve has offered an entire year and the whole gallery space to the artist to unfolded the ten chapters of the visual, mental and perceptive “odyssey”.
A journey in time and space where reality and fiction will echo each other, either shrink, swell, or seem forever at odds with one another.
Scrutinising the interweaving of life experience and its imprint on the imagination, Mathieu Briand fathoms the quality of today’s world whose reality is confined in the naming of it alone. It is obvious that when confronted to each other, neither life nor imagination has the upper hand, but what we consider as real is the constant intertwining of both.
To this purpose, the artist has partly adopted the visual language of Stanley Kubrick’s cult film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s recurring associations create an idiosyncratic, aesthetic vocabulary which blends the whole. To boot, the influence of the film is here expressed in the radical reversal of time passing.
The appropriate word to describe Mathieu Briand ‘s project is definitely “manipulation”. As would a prestidigitator, Briand leads us into his private world — a world made of personal references, either self-experienced or dreamed of — and to this purpose the tricks he uses are material objects and visual events alike. These references are brought together and distanced again; in the illusionist perspective thus created, another world emerges, with multiple entrances and no known frontiers.
When so doing, he attempts — while questioning and even dissecting a certain number of elements — to lead the viewer to find a way of its own and in order to achieve this form of training, he paves the way of the viewer with compulsory questions about his surroundings. The outcome of this seminal obligation requires necessarily the unravelling of threads, i.e. the threads of one’s own perception of the world, the threads of one’s own history.
Et in libertalia Ego :
I am currently working on a project which takes place on a small island in Madagascar called Nosy T***A. The project is called ET IN LIBERTALIA EGO. The project is based on the idea of the pirate’s utopia, inspired by the novel Libertalia by Captain Charles Johnson. In 2008 I decided to go visit and do some research on Libertalia. Nosy T***A is a sacred place. After 2 years of going back and forth to the Island with different ideas, I finally proposed to rent a part of their land to build a studio and develop my ideas of libertalia. The possibility of production we have there is limited and is part of the challenge. In November 2012 I installed works by Pierre Huygue, Thomas Hirschhorn and Damián Ortega. In January 2013 I installed works by Juan Pablo Macias, Gabriel Kuri, and Dejode & Lacombe. Since 2014, the project is support by La Maison Rouge in Paris.
For further information, please visit:
http://www.lamaisonrouge.org/cgi?usr=jeck3vg8gp&lg=en&pag=2333&tab=108&rec=70&frm=0&id=3935&flux=910935
For further information about Mathieu Briand, please visit:
http://www.mathieubriand.com/
Mathieu Briand, L'enfant mage, 2014, Oil on wood, 17 x 26 cm | 6.69 x 10.24 in, # BRIA0021
SPRING 1883
ARNDT is pleased to announce its participation at SPRING 1883, at the Windsor Hotel, Melbourne, Australia.
Taking place from August 14 - 17, open from 12pm to 6pm.
The exhibition SPRING 1883 shows the work of French artist Mathieu Briand.
ARNDT presents in addition German artist Martin Kippenberger in a Sidebooth.
Installation View, 2014, SPRING 1883 | Hotel Windsor Melbourne 
Installation view, 2014, SPRING 1883 | Hotel Windsor Melbourne 
Installation view, 2014, SPRING 1883 | Hotel Windsor Melbourne