MATHILDE DENIZE: SOUND OF FIGURES
Perrotin is pleased to present Sound of Figures, a solo exhibition by French artist Mathilde Denize.
January 11 - February 19, 2025
In Mathilde Denize’s Sound of Figures, a suite of new paintings in acrylic and watercolor surrounds sculptural garments suspended from the ceiling and ceramic vessels punctuating the gallery. Describing her paintings as “landscapes,” Denize’s “fluid expanses” are inherent not only in the permeable atmospheres, the virtual environs of her canvases but also clearly inclusive of the space beyond them as well. Denize’s geography courts a spirit of continuity and conversation between her paintings and the complementary forms that populate the space between the gallery’s walls.
Exceeding one format or media, Denize’s vocabulary floats into the real space of the gallery in the form of dimensional experiments that echo the silhouettes and shapes familiar to her canvases, casting the gallery space itself as a greater landscape shifted and choreographed according to Denize’s evocative design. In this, Denize looks to precursors such as Ree Morton and Anna Boghigian.
In keeping with this cross-pollinating spirit, Denize’s titles for these works and the exhibition they assemble into likens the visual forms at play here with similarly graphic sonic phenomena, or messages from ephemeral spirits who speak from behind a painted veil. In her words, they “echo” or “murmur,” gurgling up from the possibly infinite zone beneath or beyond the surface of each painting. Such equations recall the visionary hypotheses of abstract artists such as Wassily Kandinsky or Hilma af Klint. To this legacy, Denize adds an inquiry into the materiality of memory, casting the painting as a space for both forgetting and excavating.
As such, Denize encourages us again to think without bounds of a permeability of format and form, to appreciate the similar role of her paintings, garments, and ceramics, all evocative vessels, containers designed for and shaped by otherwise esoteric forces.