Vernissage de l'exposition "Le souffle continu" de Mathis Collins

Mathis Collins? art is rooted in the history of popular arts and crafts: fairground arts, tréteaux theater, puppetry and street music. Historically, these modes of expression developed in France as an alternative to the control exercised by political power over artistic life. Nomadic and irreverent, they represented an island of exuberance and creativity, necessary to circumvent censorship, which Mathis Collins draws on for his practice. Today, his practice combines performance art, poetry, the organization of participatory art workshops and polychrome wood sculpture, for which he has developed a series of self-taught techniques. For this exhibition, the artist has created a new work inspired by an emblematic object of the fairground arts, the barrel organ, used extensively in the nineteenth century by street musicians to peddle popular songs and judicial laments. This mechanical instrument, which requires no musical knowledge to operate, is deeply linked to the first steps of popular artistic education in the nineteenth century, bringing a broad spectrum of music to rural and working-class populations. Conceived as a perfect analogy of the human vocal system, thanks to its continuous breath, it inspired Mathis Collins to create a visual and sound installation for which the artist composed the music himself for the first time, transcribed onto perforated cardboard produced for the exhibition. This installation dialogues with a group of works emblematic of the artist?s recent practice: wooden bas-reliefs inhabited by grotesque figures and situations, in which Mathis Collins stages himself in an exercise in self-mockery with an air of social criticism.