Artist: Manuel Mathieu

Pilar Corrias presents Bury Your Masters, Manuel Mathieu’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring new paintings and sculptural works, Mathieu excavates inherited legacies (familial, political and spiritual) to question and interrogate their authority in a world where empathy seems to have vanished.

Bury Your Masters combines personal and historical reckoning with rupture and rebirth through a play with diverse media and materiality, envisioning a world that is both sacred and unsettled; where remnants of the past continue and persist. Mathieu harnesses the power of abstraction to create an installation that shifts from two to three dimensions, unfolding as an immersive ceremony of confronting truths. Through his material enquiries, Mathieu unmasks the fight for dignity and self-preservation in a world where a collective and equitable experience of reality seems impossible.

Bury Your Masters

In the name of our mother
As the key I swallowed travelled deep into my spine
it unravelled the threads that wove my being
Through the long path it touched my curse –
Skip, skip, skip
Sweat turns to oceans
Where lost spirits swim
Ohhh father, one word and our bones are yours One
word and the horizon becomes the thread –
– that stitches us all back together.
We embraced our fate,
Feeding the earth with the silken flesh
Of our mortal souls.
Emanci (t) ation (n) (p)

In the name of our sons
My black nipples hang to the ground
in search of roots to escape
Freedom abandoned us for rage
That shiver comes with shame
I dig deep, yearning to touch your core,
Yet the undercurrent of self-preservation
Drifts me apart.
Consumed where all could see
I wear my shame like a second skin.
Just silence where a soul once lived.
My courage wears the veil of a femme de joie
Nowhere to hide
I barter parts of myself for hope,
That crumble like ash in the wind.
Come undone by a genocide of stars.
Oh fist of dignity, enter my flesh...
Choose my heart once again
Lace (t) ation (r) (n)

In the name of the holy spirit
The devil sucks me like ice
drip by drip, cut by cut
We become one
Peri-neum
My convictions disappear in my reflection
Ohhh white s(k)ins
Don't forget the weight of your sins
As the skeletons of your past become your altar
On your knees, you will become slaves
Serving the empty black hole that once held all your certainties
4 times you will die before finding peace
4 times you will scream before finding a voice
4 times you will birth before finding life
4 times you will disappear before finding a gaze

Manuel Mathieu (b.1986 Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a multidisciplinary artist, working with painting, drawing, ceramics and installation, investigating themes of historical violence, erasure and cultural approaches to physicality, nature and spiritual legacy. His interests are partially informed by his upbringing in Haiti and his experience emigrating to Montréal at the age of nineteen. Freely operating in between and borrowing from numerous historical influences and traditions, Mathieu aims to find meaning through a spiritual or asemic mode of apparition; where the active space of abstraction encourages a transitory state that challenges our engrained expectations. A solo exhibition by Mathieu will open at the Phi Foundation, Montreal in October 2025. His award-winning short film, Pendulum, is currently on view at Saint-Louis Art Museum (February– November 2025). Recent solo exhibitions include: World Discovered Under Other Skies, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami and The End of Figuration, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (both 2024).