Mathilde Rosier

Lunch on the Road Going Across the Summer

Kestner Gesellschaft is pleased to announce a new commission for the Tender Buttons Café: a monumental drawing by the French artist Mathilde Rosier, inspired by Hannah Arendt 1952 poem Fahrt durch Frankreich.

Fahrt durch Frankreich

Erde dichtet Feld an Feld,
flicht die Bäume ein daneben,
lässt uns unsere Wege weben. um die Äcker in die Welt.

Blüten jubeln in dem Winde,
Gras schiesst auf, sich weich zu betten,
Himmel blaut und grüsst mit Linde,
Sonne spinnt die sanften Ketten.

Menschen gehen unverloren -
Erde, Himmel, Licht und Wald -
jeden Frühling neugeboren.
spielend in das Spiel der Allgewalt.

Hannah Arendt, 1952

There seems to be no continuity of time and therefore, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only permanent change.

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 1961

Homo faber has always been destructive of nature…behaves like lord and master of the earth. Its productivity being conceived in the image of a creative God, since, if God creates ex nihilo, man creates from a given substance, human productivity must by definition lead to a Promethean revolt because it does not build a world made by man only after having destroyed a part of nature created by God.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958

Through the combination of painting, film, dance and music, Mathilde Rosier constructs oneiric situations that allow the beholder to lose any sense of space and time, opening a portal between conscious and unconscious realms. Her work stems from her interest in the physical and psychological experience of ancient rites and rituals. It reflects the need to return to harmonious ways of integrating human activity with the “natural environment”, including pre-industrial practices that might seem anti-rational, observing the world from the vantage of the present-day countryside.

Her large scale drawing Lunch on the Road Going Across the Summer (acrylic paint on found printed fabric), conceived especially for the Cafe Tender Buttons is a fine composition of six elements, based upon diverse plants and birds’ patterns, as if floating in space and accompanying the movement of the visitors. Here, Henri Matisse meets Gertrude Stein meets Hannah Arendt meets Mathilde Rosier at a confluence of a biographical nostalgia and the perils of the Anthropocene era.

The artist reflects on her artistic process: “I read that some of Matisse’s interiors, with their juxtaposition of multiple decorative patterns, influenced Gertrude Stein’s writings. In those paintings, like in Stein’s poems, the attention is distracted from the subject in favour of an opening of the vision to a wider angle, with no center but a large expanded awareness of a scene with no clear limit between the elements. The situation is confusing but the lost focus, letting our attention gently drift, in a mild trance, makes us more present, more essentially alive, in the moment.

The Café Tender Buttons is a paradoxical space, a balcony turned toward the inside of the building, it is an ideal location to contemplate, from the balustrade, a view on a garden of printed plants from the world of interior but vanishing like on an old tapestry too long exposed to the light and the dust. The decay of this vanishing garden reveals abstract landmarks of modernity; the traces left by the intense agriculture on a nude soil like fields of lines only alternated by equally intense electric poles.

At the end, all forms dissolve and what remains is only motion and energy, motion as a horizon of fields of forces that come and go and energy as a vertical pillar, like an acupuncture needle in this horizon of currents. The movement erases the traditional tapestry of floral patterns that decorates the interiors of the European bourgeoisie. Erasing also an attempt of domestication of the living force of nature.”

Mathilde Rosier (born 1973, Paris) studied visual arts at École nationale superieure des beaux-arts de Paris and at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, as well as the economic sciences at Dauphine University Paris. She currently lives and works in Burgundy, France. Rosier is Professor at Institute Art Gender Nature of the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel, Switzerland.

A list of her recent solo exhibitions and performances includes: Dans les champs d’intensive prospérité, Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris (2023); Sketches in the margin, je vous propose, Zürich (2021); Le Massacre du printemps, Museo MADRE, Naples (2020); MASP, São Paulo (2020); How to Dance in the Fields, Razem Pamoja Foundation, Warsaw (2019); Figures of Climax of the Impersonal Empire, Fondazione Guido Ludovico Luzzatto, Milan (2018); In Revolution. Resolution of Some Hierarchic Orders, Der Tank Institut Kunst, Basel (2016); Organs of the Whale, Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund (2012); Necklace of Fake Teeth, Camden Arts Centre, London (2011); Mathilde Rosier. Rite de passage, Kunstpalais, Erlangen (2011); Find circumstances in the antechamber, Musée Jeu de Paume, Paris (2011); Play for a stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty, performance at Serpentine Gallery, London (2009).

She has shown and performed in several group exhibitions such as: L’écorce, CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2023); Dancing Plague, GAMeC, Bergamo (2022); Utopia Dystopia: il mito del progresso partendo dal sud, Museo MADRE, Naples (2021); Kosmos Emma Kunz, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2021) travelled to Tabakalera, San Sebastiàn (2022); Freedoms, Razem Pamoja Foundation, Warsaw (2019); Metamorphoses – Let Everything Happen to You, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2018); Writing the Mountains, 6th Biennale Gherdëina, Ortisei – Italy (2018); The Waves of the Oh!s and the Ah!s, performance, Chiesa di San Lorenzo, Venice (2018); Volcano Extravaganza, Fiorucci Art Trust, Stromboli (2015) and many others…