MATHILDE NARDONE - Galerie Nardone

MATHILDE NARDONE

Young emerging artist combining an Italian aesthetic that emphasizes its origins and the still life symbol of a true tradition in northern Europe and Flanders in particular.

Terrils - Slag heaps
Flourishes from down-under

Terrils in French are slag heaps or coal hills. Split this French word in two and it gets a completely different meaning: “terre” means earth and “îles” means islands. Why is this important? Because when for the first time, Mathilde Nardone spoke to me about the flowers she picked on slag heaps, I heard “Terre-îles” - earth-islands - and imagined a sea of fertile island-like mounds that had become a place of asylum just like the volcanoes of ancient times. I knew nothing of these conical mountains that emerged from the shovels, picks and peaks of coal miners, all brave workers of the carbon depths.

Treated in the manner of Flemish still lifes, the detail and abundance of flowers are at the heart of the young artist’s work which is pushed to its paroxysm through the removal of all other objects, vases or recognizable intermediary supports, thus causing a floral spurt. She rivals with inventiveness and technique to bring out the veiled parts of her composition through pure matter such as grains or seeds, depth by superimposing layers of flowers on a background of chilling blackness, and movement by finding the means of sublimating these elements through a diffuse light that hangs on the mesmerizing and hypnotic front planes of her work while fading out the more distant planes, more murky and blurred.

Her technique approached from an experimental stance - the scanner allowing an inverted dynamic between back and front which makes her initial work of assembling materials, objects and organizing these a challenge of practice and anticipation akin to the weaving done on a horizontal loom - is even more visible in her works called Natures mortes par scanner - Lives made still by scanner - where the attempt and pleasure of searching for a way of breathing life into stills whilst playing around with the machine-tool; questioning its possibilities and its limits, and observing its interaction with the natural subject matter, contribute to the construction of an extremely pleasing visual at once delicate and full of poetic lightness.

Heir to the memory of a miner from Charleroi, Mathilde Nardone makes hatch out of the other end of the infinite roots that dig into the black hole of the mine, that old nightmare of progress, a vegetation of impenetrable beauty that exhales dust.

Excerpt from an article by LEÏLA VASSEUR-LAMINE

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2021
Cadavre Exquis, group show, Venezia, Italy
Luisa Catucci Gallery, Berlin, Germany
Exposition en duo avec Mario Ferretti, Galerie Nardone - La Louvière, Belgium
2020
AAF, Hamburg, Germany
Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris, France
Université de Lille, Lille, France
2019
Solo Show Galerie Nardone, Bruxelles, Belgium
Art Elysées, Paris, France
The Hague Art Fair, Den Haag, Nederlands
Expo en ligne, Plateforme Internet : Art Zone 35
Biennale de Namur, Citadelle de Namur, Belgium
Art Buzan - Rhema Galerie (Toulouse), South Korea
AAF, Bruxelles - Wunderkammer GN, Belgium
Art Up, Lille - Wunderkammer GN, France
2018
Fotofever, Paris – Luisa Catucci Gallery (Berlin), France
Art Market Budapest, Budapest – Galerie Nardone, Hungary
KIAF Art Séoul, Séoul – Galerie Nardone, South Korea
2017
OFF Course Young Contemporary Art Fair, Bruxelles – Luisa Catucci Gallery (Berlin), Belgium
2016
Mia Photo, Milan – Luisa Catucci Gallery (Berlin), Italy
The Others, Turin – Cell63 Gallery (Berlin), Italy