"Pinnacle 1” is one of Mathieu’s major works from 2019. The painting is driven by sweeping gestures and fluid chromatic currents: incandescent oranges, steel-blues, and deep reds weave together with a combustion-like intensity. Across the surface, phantom traces of eyes and fractured human forms appear and dissolve—like shards of subconscious memory, or migrating spiritual entities resonant with Haiti’s Vodou cosmology.
Color in this work behaves like molten matter, cascading and erupting with energetic force—evoking an image of rebirth in the aftermath of trauma. The boundary between abstraction and figuration repeatedly collapses, placing the viewer in a continuous loop of recognition and disorientation. This semi-apparitional visual structure operates as a psychic register: a double articulation of the artist’s spiritual memory of Haiti and the corporeal rupture of his own near-fatal accident. The painting is not abstraction for abstraction’s sake, but the visualization of a spiritual wound—made visible as luminous, volatile matter.