Matthieu Dorval
Artist born in Brest, France. Matthieu Dorval creates visual arts innovations inspired by the Abstract and Neo-Expressionist movements. His urgent brush strokes, strong colors and harmonious compositions express the enduring poetic force of the elements. He has immersed himself in nature on tiny islands in Brittany, along the cliffs in Ireland, and while undertaking a 1500-kilometer odyssey on foot across France. His paintings draw as much on his immersive experiences in nature and his meticulous observation of his environment as on scientific literature and great authors: Victor Hugo, Victor Segalen and John Muir, to name but a few. His works share kinship and resonance with science’s efforts to define void, matter, space, time, and life. During his project inspired by The Travels of Marco Polo, he took up an artist-in-residence position in 2016 at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing and participated in the international project “Ailleurs est Ici” [Elsewhere Is Here]. In 2018, he was invited to the Shangyu Ceramic Art Center and created a series of ceramics, Les Officiers célestes [The Celestial Officers], that joined the museum’s collections. He has also been an artist in residence at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. All of these experiences deep in nature and in the jam-packed bustle of Asian metropolises have shaped his corpus. They provide a common thread of reflection throughout his work—the tension between the romantic notion of infinity and the constraints imposed by the limitations of a finite world.
Residency/Fellowship
2023 Changing Climate
Website
Location
Crozon, France
© Santa Fe Art Institute / Santa Fe, New Mexico / 
