Following on from a recent exhibition entitled Les Âmes Bleues, presented in 2023 at the Le Petit Prieuré gallery, Avant L'été takes up as a common thread an exploration of the portrait as a vector of subjectivity. If this theme occupies a preponderant place in the work of Mathilde Polidori, it is because it allows us to grasp, in a few strokes, a nuanced range of expressions and thus to work on the emotions that they give us. Whether represented stylized, schematized, idealized, deconstructed or realistic, the face has always remained, throughout the ages, connected to a form of humanity. It is given in the manifestation of an intimacy which appears and gives rise to a feeling of proximity for those who look at it.

Because faces certainly disarm and influence our own emotions. It is from this perspective that Mathilde Polidori has chosen to represent her loved ones, parents and friends, by constituting a palette of views which she uses to work on the very material of our emotions. His portraits are sometimes frontal and unsettling, sometimes lost in suspended time. The subjects seem to breathe deeply the unprecedented pleasure of the moment. We sense the satisfaction of being together, of experiencing a passion, of enjoying the time that passes, in an availability specific to daydreaming and introspection, even to meditation. The faces are close to each other, almost fitted together like in a puzzle, a way of expressing the complicity that occurs between people living on the same wavelength. Because there is a lot of complicity in the portraits made by Mathilde Polidori. These portraits are the counterpart of representations of embraces in which duos, sometimes suspended in a kiss, demonstrate amorous tenderness against a background of assumed romanticism.

Mathilde Polidori draws her inspiration from her own photographic work, which has allowed her to keep several thousand archive photos over the years. She works exclusively with oil painting on linen canvas. Only this medium gives him the possibility of hollowing out the material, thanks to its prolonged drying time, while preserving a smooth surface where the layers subtly overlap. If the artist favors this technique of flat areas, it is to bring out his motifs little by little, as if it were a question of reaching the emotion at the very heart of the soul. To bring her portraits to life, Mathilde Polidori plays on the contrasts between shadows and lights, using colors that distance themselves from reality, an approach that allows her to weave a link between the poetry of colors and the emotional richness of the subjects represented.

For the fifteen oils on canvas from Before Summer, it is mainly yellow, but also bright red, softened by orange and pink, and some secondary additions of blue and green. These bright and warm colors immerse us in a warm and sensual world. Unlike the palette used for Blue Souls where royal blue and sand and brown tones dominated. Thus the present exhibition announces the summer period, a magical interlude where time, as if suspended, becomes a promise of relaxation, freedom and escape. What emerges is an impression of sunlight mixed with sensations of spring warmth. Mathilde Polidori cites many colorist artists who inspire her, as much for the material, the flat areas as the work of the line: Wayne Thiebaud, Alice Neel, Georgia O Keeffe or even Pierre Bonnard, Claire Tabouret or Suzanne Valadon, influences which cross very varied eras and artistic movements, which nevertheless share a common sensitivity.

For the Before Summer solo show scheduled during the international contemporary art fair Art Paris, Mathilde Polidori chose to set up in the heart of the Marais, in the Le Petit Prieuré gallery, an ideal cocoon for the presentation of her paintings intimate. It will be followed by the first institutional exhibition dedicated to the artist, Le Temps rêve, which will be held at the Edgar Mélik Museum in Cabriès-en-Provence, from April 18 to June 9, 2024. She will present around forty paintings and drawings. preliminaries. This will be an opportunity to take on another challenge, that of the spaces dedicated to his works, or how to invest the disproportionate rooms of this castle-Museum with a subject relating to the intimate.

Agathe Anglionin, curator of the exhibition