Through painting, video and performance, Mathilde Rosier constructs narratives that evoke the presence of dancing bodies, dreamlike and metaphysical situations able to confront the spectator with the sensation that time and space have lost their meaning. At the same time, her work spurs reflections about our presence and relationship with the earth and the devastating effects that we can have on it.
Here we present three recent works by the artist. They are part of an extensive research, whose starting point is the collective dances of the rural agricultural communities, from periods and geographic regions directly connected to the origins of agriculture.
Le Massacre du Printemps [The Massacre of Spring], 2020, is inspired in the original version of Le Sacre du Printemps [The Rite of Spring], a ballet by Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950), Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) and Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) created for the Ballets Russes in 1913. Filmed in the context of the sounds and sights of the city of Naples, it creates sounds and movements based on the symphony by Stravinsky and the choreography by Nijinsky. The painting Assumption of the Virgin (1477), by Francesco Botticini, painted for the funeral chapel of Matteo Palmieri, in the church of San Pier Maggiore, in Florence, today demolished, serves as a visual starting point for this new work, in which the characters dance in the sky and on the sea and land, generating a new symbolic rite of connection with the earth and the natural environment.
Body and Soil and Les Forêts couchées [The Supine Forests], 2020, present two new choreographies in which the artists interact directly with nature. With simple and precise movements, Rosier invites us to develop an “interdependent, interconnected, telepathic and empathic” relationship with the land, in her own words.
Mathilde Rosier lives and works between Burgundy, France, and Basel, Switzerland. Her recent exhibitions include Le Massacre du Printemps, at the Museu Madre (Naples, 2020), and Pensando como outra forma de vida terrena, at The Breeder gallery (Athens, 2018). She has also held shows at Fundação Guido Ludovico Luzzatto (Milan, 2018); Castello di Rivoli (Turin, 2018); Der Tank Institut Kunst (Basel, 2016); Fundação Razem Pamoja (Kraków, 2015); and Fiorucci Art Trust (Stromboli, 2015).
CURATED BY María Inés Rodríguez, adjunct curator of modern and contemporary art, MASP