Selected Works

Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to announce Mothership, the highly anticipated New York debut of French painter Mathieu Cherkit, showcasing a new series of paintings on view 26 June - 15 August at 525 West 22nd Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated digital publication featuring an essay by Megan Kincaid.

Cherkit’s interiors possess a dreamlike quality, where scale and perspective are fluid, not fixed. Embracing subjectivity, Cherkit does not strive for a precise depiction of his surrounds, but uses memory and perception as a conduit for how the mind shapes these familiar domestic spaces. As a result, these paintings of his home and studio in France feel as though they have passed through the mind’s eye, imbued with emotion, emphasis, and time. Here, objects swell beyond proportion, architectural features shift as if seen from multiple vantage points, and colors have the warm familiarity of a hazy memory; the result is not a rational reconstruction of the home, but a chronicle of how we internalize space.

Cherkit’s curiosity of space extends beyond the structure of his interiors into the very surface of his paintings. His thick, impastoed brushwork draws attention to specific moments in the composition—the worn grain of a staircase bannister, the sunken lines of bathroom tile grout, or the ghostly trace of a face abstracted into the foliage of a garden. These textured passages act almost like ciphers, signaling that these objects (or the memories of them) hold particular weight in the artist’s mind. This tactile application extends beyond the edges of the canvas, allowing the oil paint to bleed past these traditional boundaries, extending the pictorial space such that it mirrors the fuzzy contours of a memory taking shape.

As Megan Kincaid notes, “Attempting to capture how he and his environment vary over a long, temporal duration entails conveying shifts in feeling and tone, in addition to changing scenery and light. Serrated edges, scumbled paint, and hints of underpainting seem conceptually related to the inconsistent, near messy, spaces that Cherkit routinely portrays––down to the silt and dirt of his home garden. But as mundanity and moodiness consistently open onto formal sophistication and near existential self-evaluation, a larger philosophy appears at stake, one suggesting that our psyches can be mapped onto the unevenness of everyday life and its irrational flows.”