Mathieu Josset is a self-taught visual artist specializing in the use of fabrics. His works,
straddling the line between abstraction and figuration, emphasize the symbolism of folding and
knotting as elements of connection between emotions, stories, and identities. His work draws on
the cultural richness of textile materials while reinterpreting them in a contemporary artistic
language.
Mathieu has a strong artistic connection with Afro-Caribbean cultures. He participated in the
Dakar Biennale 2022 - Collective Exhibition at the Marché International des Arts de Dakar. He
was also the guest of honor at the inauguration of the International Center for Contemporary
Art and Cultures in Dakar in 2021.
The artist aims to catalyze his vision of African heritage through the lens of music, fashion,
and dance, his favorite themes. He strives to create colorful, expressive, and highly textured
works, particularly using bazin, a very popular fabric in West Africa, used for making
ceremonial garments to celebrate significant occasions. For the artist, textiles alone
encompass many meanings: traditional ceremonies, weddings, dances, and music.
Through his work, Mathieu seeks to express his friendship with ancestral Africa, making it
resonate in the contemporaneity of a transforming Africa that spreads across the world, an
Africa rich in its legends and customs, and flourishing with its innovative youth.
Mathieu Josset creates series of unique works primarily made from strips of cut, knotted, and
assembled bazin fabric, forming vibrant portraits and abstract compositions that celebrate
collective energy and the beauty of human connections.
He explores the dialogue between material, movement, and identity through a singular approach
to weaving and knotting.
The act of folding engages volume, material, and textures. Through this relationship between
the artist's intention and execution, sensations emerge—both from the one who hunts for fabric,
feels, transforms, and composes with it, and from those who observe, step back, move closer,
put things in perspective, and surrender to the repetitive patterns, reimagining the sensation
of the pieces affixed to the canvas.
Every detail of the work, every knot, every fold is an entity in itself. Through this, the
artist questions the concept of art through the craft of fabric and its patterns.
His art seems to invite viewers to explore not only the visual beauty but also the depth of
emotions and stories that his works convey.
Mathieu Josset's works are gestures and sensations, frames and perspectives, memory and
possibility.
“The work of Mathieu Josset in the warmth of its colors, is a metaphor that highlights the fundamental
values of the diversity of cultural expressions to illuminate the collective memory.”
Kalidou Kassé
Plastic artist, Expository commissionner, Founding director of the TAGGAT school of visual arts
