Georges Mathieu

Galerie Protée, Paris

Private Collection, Rambouillet

Faure-Rey, Rambouillet, 13 May 1990

Piasa, Paris, 18 June 1997, lot 120

Meeting Art, Vercelli, 22 June 2002, lot 105

Galleria d'Arte Soave, Alessandria

Farsettiarte, Prato, 29 May 2010, lot 542

Galleria Biasutti & Biasutti, Turin

Private Collection

Artcurial, Paris, 5 December 2023, lot 29

Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Alessandria, Galleria d'Arte Soave, Georges Mathieu, June - September 2005, no. 19, p. 35, illustrated

Executed in 1989, Illusions obscures belongs to the mature period of Georges Mathieu's work, in which the gestural vocabulary elaborated during the 1950s is reinvested with a new acuity. The shift to alkyd, a fast-drying synthetic medium that Mathieu adopted extensively in his later works, is a deliberate choice: more fluid and more rapid than oil, it aligns with the logic of an art founded on the primacy of speed and the impossibility of revision. On this more contained format, each mark is correspondingly more exposed, more sovereign.

The composition unfolds along a tension between restraint and proliferation. Calligraphic signs of dense whiteness, linear bursts, emerge from a dark ground with the precision of a script from which all lexical meaning has been abolished, leaving only its dynamic. The title, Illusions obscures, introduces a reflexive dimension rare in Mathieu's work: it suggests not an external subject but an interrogation of the nature of painting itself, of what the gesture claims to capture and what necessarily eludes it. The formal clarity of the sign and the opacity of the black ground thus enter into dialogue.

What Illusions obscures reveals with particular clarity is that maturity did not temper the gesture but distilled it. Mathieu intensifies what remains irreducible: the conviction that painting is, above all, an act of knowledge accomplished in the instant, and that the instant does not repeat itself.