An encounter with Mathilde Rosier, painter of moving images

Mathilde Rosier’s work is an oxymoron, both anchored in its time and timeless in its form. It is also suffused with history, drawing on aesthetic and theoretical tropes from the medieval period through to early 20th-century Surrealism. In her idyllic rural home studio in Burgundy, Rosier creates immersive interdisciplinary works combining painting, video, installation, and performance. We sat down with the artist to discuss her work in advance of a major solo exhibition at the Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris.

Juliette Desorgues: Let’s start with the present. Tell us about your exhibition at the Fondation Pernod Ricard.

Mathilde Rosier: The exhibition brings together works produced in the past four years, beginning in 2019. It also includes pieces that date back to 2007. Some of these have already been exhibited in Paris, but I would like to show the continuity of my work over the past 15 years. The works incorporate video, sound, painting, and sculpture. The exhibition proposes a poetic transfiguration of the agricultural world and of my experience of contemporary agrarian life. I reflect on what it is to live in the rural world in present-day France and the difficulties it generates. I observe the landscape from a geopolitical viewpoint.

How does this manifest in your region, Burgundy?

There is a lot more wheat since last summer, for example, because of the war in Ukraine. Climate change does not only affect which crops are grown but also the very lives of plants. People are now beginning to plant palm trees in Burgundian gardens while trees native to the region are dying. My workshop has a panoramic view of the countryside: Every spring and summer, I look out on a painting – that of the fields whose colors change over time.

It is interesting to think about these ecological and political changes as one would reflect on painting…

Painting was my starting point. I turned to it as soon as I began to study economics and social sciences at university. I very quicky realized that a poetic, creative, and imaginative dimension was spilling over and out from me.

And yet your work since then has been interdisciplinary. What is your relationship to painting now?

Painting is central, but I discovered cinema when I was a college student in Paris and acquired this double culture of museums and movie theaters. I wanted to become a painter who makes moving images. I wanted to make something more total.

This idea of a total artwork particular to the theater resonates in your work.

Absolutely. In fact, I am showing works at the Fondation Ricard that have a poetic quality. Certain older works are positioned in the space like theatrical decor, and there are some videos with an almost operatic quality to them.

You also create environments that engulf visitors in a way immersive theater might.

I have always been interested by the idea of transfiguring not only the real but the visitors themselves as well. Painting alone is not enough for me. I want to create a proposition that invites visitors to slip into another state – a state of calm, of silence. Romain Rolland speaks of an ‘oceanic feeling,’ for example. My works seek to induce this state.

Hence your particular interest in psychoanalysis?

Yes, especially in Carl Jung, who believed in this idea of oceanic feeling – of a mystical body that the Western world has denied. That is how I consider myself: as a kind of visionary artist bringing together body and spirit.

The Surrealist movement took this same position. In fact, one can see the influence of Surrealist artists like Dorothea Tanning or even Birgit Jürgenssen in your work.

Indeed, those artists had a strong connection to the mystical body. I am particularly interested in the Middle Ages, a time when humans had a completely different relationship to the world than we do today.

It is a relationship that goes against this idea of a linear progress, of the ‘intensive prosperity’ referred to in your exhibition title.

Yes, I think there are things we should keep from the medieval period.

If we come back to the present, what else are you working on at the moment?

I have several projects in progress, but I work slowly. This idea of intensive prosperity also applies to the art world. On the contrary, I like to take my time. Right now, I am working with master glassmakers at Cirva to make a permanent work for the facade of the Mucem conservation center in Marseille.