PARIS.- “Always on My Mind,” Mathieu Cherkit’s fourth solo show with Xippas and his second exhibition in the gallery’s Paris location, draws inspiration from the artist’s own domestic sphere and daily routines. While some of the eleven new paintings on view revisit locations he has depicted in previous works (like Glissement, 2025, which features a distinctive twisting yellow staircase), others explore new terrains, including his galley kitchen (Yelo Voodoo, 2025), home office (TT, 2025), garden (Iris and Cerasus serrulate, both 2025), and the paved road winding past his front door (Grande rue, 2023-2024). Recalling the fervor with which van Gogh painted the interior and environs of his beloved “yellow house” in Arles, Cherkit’s depictions of his immediate surroundings are rooted in reality and capture fleeting emotional experiences of place.
While details like recognizable brand logos, familiar elements of home décor, and quotidian electronics firmly relate Cherkit’s scenes to the here and now, references to temporality and abstraction expand time and space on a broader scale. Scenes within the house show glimpses of how children change a home over time, both physically and conceptually. Scattered marbles on the stairway in Glissement, for example, evoke a mixture of playfulness and precarity. A small disembodied hand reaching up to the counter in Yelo Voodoo, meanwhile, consecrates the kitchen as a place for growth and discovery. Similarly, Cherkit’s landscapes reference seasonal changes, showing plants in different stages of growth and wilt.
Cherkit’s painting techniques support his desire to extend the scenes he paints beyond a single moment frozen in time. Built up through many layers and thick impastos, the paintings’ stratified and textural surfaces act as material records of the time it takes to complete a painting. Each work bears a unique beveled edge formed by heavily layered paint, which extends well past the natural perimeter of the canvas. By adding mass to his compositions, Cherkit literally and physically pushes his subjects beyond the confines of the canvas. Conversely, the artist also works reductively, carving into the surfaces of his paintings in ways that suggest subtle references to the past. In Grand rue he has used the back of a brush to engrave a cartoonish face into a small area depicting the exterior wall of his neighbor’s house. This and other ghostly presences buried within the paintings’ strata add to their powerful sense of material and conceptual depth.
If Cherkit’s paintings expand our experience of temporality, they also collapse traditional distinctions between figuration and abstraction. The kitchen space in Voodoo features familiar furnishings, food items, and cleaning products set within a narrow room that recedes towards a back wall with an open doorway. In addition to a habitable space with narrative connotations, this composition can also be appreciated as a symphony of rectangles in shades of yellow, orange, red and white. Evoking the reverse experience of bringing real-world references to abstract paintings—finding a cityscape in a Mondrian or a landscape in a Rothko, for example—Cherkit’s paintings of domestic scenes studded with abstract forms expand our experience of space, place and time.
Born in 1982 in Paris, Mathieu Cherkit lives and works in Vallery, Bourgogne, France.
Mathieu Cherkit is a major figure of the emerging French generation of figurative painters, now exhibited internationally. The inspiration for his works comes mainly from the house where he lives. With one floor and a garden that he cultivates, his residence there serves as a pretext to explore multiple subjects, embodied by trinkets, childhood memories, his recent paternity, or even art works that surround him. It also allows him to approach the subject of painting itself and its power to dismiss realism in order to describe a personal universe.
In his colorful works, loaded with oil paint which spills over from the stretcher, Mathieu Cherkit thwarts the principles of central perspective. He mixes viewpoints with the aim of creating different spaces and temporalities and bringing to life the architecture and the objects that he lives with.
Mathieu Cherkit is a finalist of Jean-François Prat Prize, as well as of the Science-Po Prize for contemporary art and Antoine Marin Prize.
Public collections: Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France; Musée Estrine, Saint-Rémy de Provence, France; Musée des Avelines, Saint-Cloud, France; CNAP, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Fondation Salomon, Alex, France; Fondation Colas, Paris, France; Caldic Collection/ Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Akzo Nobel, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
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