Tu me ramènes à la vie

Born in 1984 in Chartres (France), Mathieu Dufois lives and works in Tours. Between 2002 and 2007, he studied plastic arts at the School of Fine Arts in Mans. After graduation, he worked in criminal courts to produce portraits of accused for local newspapers. It was already, through drawing that he tried to transcribe the memory of a scene, an event, a person. In 2008, during his par- ticipation in the Mulhouse Biennale, he won the first prize for Young Creation. Since then, his work has been shown in various art places, including the CRAC in Sète, the CCCOD in Tours and the Galerie de l’Etrave in Thonon-les-Bains. His works have also been presented at various fairs such as Drawing Now, Art Paris and the Armory Show. Since 2010, a strong collaboration has been created with the musician Marc Hurtado, who composes the soundtrack for his films located between animation and the experimental. 

On paper, what can we take from reality? Through the medium of drawing, he examines the past, the memories and the images that flow from it. This explo- ration notably involves the reappropriation of sequences of films or photographs of archives: a decryption, almost like an archaeological process, which would delve into the different strata of the image in order to bring them to the surface. Passionate about cinema, Mathieu Dufois continues to explore his favorite tool, drawing, articulating it with cinematographic art, sound material and installa- tion. He is inspired by black and iconic films from the 1950s and 60s, fascinated by their atmospheres and their characters on the fringe. From sequences of a few minutes - often moments of particular tension - he extracts several shots and then, with black stone, he transforms them, recomposes them, glues them and assembles them to finally create his own montage, as we can see in his series of drawings called the Eclipse (2013-17). Thus, Mathieu Dufois works on the concept of temporality, by playing with these freeze frames that he analyzes and interprets. Presented alone, these works translate a movement; exhibited in series, a form of narration. For him, time is nothing other than reality itself - what makes what we live happen and take place - a dense and intense reality that it compresses on paper. This editing work also gives Mathieu Dufois’s works an impression of deja-vu. However, his images being fabricated, they leave their original sources diffuse, which therefore often tend to elude us. His drawings become abyss - by copying the cinema which itself copies reality -, particularly sensitive in the Movie Theater series (2015-18) which stages disused projection rooms. Taken at night, influenced by the black novel, his own photographs can also serve as a starting point, just like these images of family taken from sou- venir films, shot in Super 8, from which he drew his series Hors Vue (2015-17), or these shots of animals he took in the Lascaux forest or the Thot park, and which ended at the creation of the Harde (2017). 

Mathieu Dufois also produces short films - a succession of projected drawings -, between animation and experimentation. Like the Trilogie des Ver- tiges (Trilogy of Vertigo) (2012-17), the la Conservation de l’éclat (Conservation of radiance) (2012), Par les ondes (By the waves) (2014), Sauf la lumière (Except the light) (2017) -, but also of Eidôlon (2017). In this intersection between the fine arts tradition and modern image capture, Mathieu Dufois’ practice focuses on this link that images have always maintained with the world of the deceased, in other words, the image in its relation to absence and death.