Mathieu Cherkit 2025 by Miles McEnery Gallery

MATHIEU CHERKIT’S INTERIORS

Megan Kincaid

For the large part, Mathieu Cherkit’s paintings can be categorized as “interiors.” Many of these compositions center on the recurrent vantages of his dual residence and studio in Paris—the sights and sight lines of everyday life that occupy his immediate surroundings and have surreptitiously lodged into his memory. Collectively, they build out a fragmented view of the artist’s home base, alluded to by the title of his exhibition at the Miles McEnery Gallery, Mothership. (It marks his New York debut.) The compositions don’t attempt to present a comprehensive or documentary reproduction of his habitat. Instead, they offer disjointed shards and abrupt glimpses, a more honest way of recognizing how we variably and fallibly encounter the world.

That, for reasons that exceed scientific exactitude or rationalization, certain objects balloon into sites of preoccupation and obsession, while others entice little attention. The same stairwell, for example, appears twice in this corpus; patterned surfaces and textile weaves become dense zones of visual stimulation; and lush and leafy potted plants generate intricate geometric schemas. It is fitting that one composition is named Always on My Minds (2025), since Cherkit guides us through the other side of what interiors here signify: a willingness to expose the imagery that lurks within the recesses of his mind. And yet, the artist’s sense of constancy and familiarity with his own environs and thoughts lead to frequent glitches: Objects feel alien, things wrinkle and tear, dramatic perspectival lines disorient, and figuration glides into fantasy.

Cherkit’s elastic notion of the interior, in turn, coincides with an expansive understanding of pictorial space and the picture plane. Conceptually speaking, the compositions on view displace the classically held notion of space as defined by a designated enclosure with precise geometric coordinates. A multitude of spaces coexist, from the natural and the architectural to the theoretical discourses of consumerism and psychology. In a suite of small-scale still lifes of verdant plant species in the artist’s garden, close-up views produce a sphere of sealed-off focus. These jewel-box paintings remind us of the absorptive joys of gardening—how the solitude of tilling and minding fledgling spouts paradoxically nourishes a world. In Aucuba Japonica Bis, Gaura Lindheimeri, and Sonchus Oleraceus (each 2024), Cherkit points to the imaginative abundance that a tiny sliver or subsection of the garden can hold. This degree of visual compression follows from the painter’s conviction that artistic practice is one of continual constriction, honing in on forms that compel visual excitement and intrigue. By implementing delimiting parameters and procedures, initial sensations and observations are transformed into idiosyncratic visual systems that capture the artist’s perspective and disposition as it turns with time—whether across an hour or with the changing seasons.

What’s more, each tangle of crisscrossing vines, irregularly formed leaves, and speckled surfaces is meticulously detailed to enliven nature’s organizational complexity––and, potentially, to demonstrate the structural sympathy between abstraction and figuration. Indeed, echoes of the modernist grid, a perforce convention of nonrepresentational painting, can be detected within these latticed greeneries. Yet, the operatic arcs and careening contours of organic matter destabilize the austerity and regularity of hard-edge geometric painting. Even among paintings with seemingly shared subject matter, the singularity of the referent, the unvarnished materiality, the blazing color palettes, and the clamor of multipoint perspectives disturbs seriality and repetition. Every still life with its own attitude. Consider another motif, the stairway, and compare the quiet alterations in light and viewpoint between Beyond the Wall (2025) and Chicane (2024–25). One bathes in the warm glow of the setting late afternoon sun, seen from a slanted corner of the landing and stirring a romantic stupor in pink and plum. The other features canary yellow floorboards that grab the bright glare of high noon.

The artist’s iterative practice throws the dynamics of perpetual modulation into sharper relief: Cherkit prepares each canvas with an abstract underpainting upon which he later, over an elongated period, constructs his tableaux. In certain cases, a painting will see successive campaigns of paint—every layer concealing beneath it a different view or take. Though figurative, these scenes elude clear narratives owing to a pervasive compositional instability that is produced by abutting planes, unrelenting angles, and harsh obliques. Pictorially, unexpected drop-offs and tousled arrangements disrupt stasis, especially that of typically flat surfaces like tabletops, beds, and flooring. Where citrus fruits bundled on an unsteady surface risk toppling into the sink, as in La Nuit (2024), Cherkit may be nodding to the iconographic staples and spatial innovations tied to the history of French painting, especially via Paul Cézanne. Contending with painting’s artificial illusion of dimensional space, these pictures sometimes disintegrate along the border or in a corner, turning into fields of gestural abstraction. Ultimately, these abortive strategies allow meaning to congeal and disperse with the imagination. This idea is literalized by another facet of the artist’s method. As Cherkit reworks a painting, layers of pigment accumulate into thick skeins that skid off the canvas edge and harden into jagged exoskeletons—thereby challenging the conventional designation of a painting as a flat, autonomous surface. These works assert their objectivity and interact with real space.

Paul Cézanne, The Basket of Apples, 1887-1900, Oil on canvas, 25 7/16 x 31 1/2 inches (65 x 80 cm)

Certain examples in this exhibition internally collide space. Particularized places of labor, repose, leisure, and child-rearing merge in emphatically raked perspectival lines—a baroque handling of composition that imparts the confounding and composite nature of the quotidian homeplace. In Headquarters (2025), a table is covered in an uncanny mélange of items, including drawing instruments, finished sketches, and a just-ripe avocado. And then, there is a more curious intrusion: the bust of a man with lustrous blond locks. Though this might be neutralized as a tool of the artist’s trade, akin to an anatomical model used in foundational drawing exercises, it disarms the viewer. Here, connections to other modernist lineages, be it metaphysical painting or surrealism, seem especially apposite. Symbols of chance and precarity cut across the paintings; the attentive eye detects a playing card or chessboard, a quixotically misplaced lemon. There are similar ruptures of this sort, a toy race car and a paper airplane streak down the staircase of Chicane. Yet, unlike the oneiric undertones of objects found in a surrealist dreamscape, these are tightly tethered to one of the most grounding aspects of the human experience: parenthood.

To this point, Cherkit’s unkempt interiors match up with heavily worked surfaces, telling us that these are places where life occurs. His paintings record the minor accidents and minutiae that typically transpire without notice. In Headquarters, a fork with bent tines has fallen off the table; nearby, a white electronic charger sits in a coiled heap. Throughout, the artist relishes playing with varied surfaces and decorative patterns that, despite their brashness and dissimilarity, somehow resolve into a homey hum. Looking once more at Always on My Minds, a more subtle detail brings the timeworn quality of Cherkit’s painting into view. The creamy tile backsplash above the sink is textured by drippy, gnarled coagulations of paint. What might be aleatory accidents of the artist’s process recollect splashes of water, toothpaste, or soap; in the lower right, a tonal gradation and an encrusted section suggest rust and tile grout.

Heightened detail comes into tension with a notable absence: the person who is ostensibly using the sink. While the possessive pronoun in Always on My Minds implies that this water basin belongs to the painter, an enigmatic anonymity allows any viewer to occupy the role. (Note that the composition strategically cuts off just beneath a glass medicine cabinet.) Moreover, the painting’s human scale and exaggerated angles make the sink leap off the canvas, exacerbating the viewer’s complicity and bodily awareness. As the work teases the divide between painting and sculpture, other binaries like presence/absence and illusion/truth are further plied apart through this exploration of corporeal disembodiment. For instance, in Game Over (2024), animate socks kick around at the foot of a bed. In Portrait (2024), an iPhone camera offers a peek at Cherkit’s visage as he peers with trepidation from above. The other two self-portraits in the show are inverted, based on a mirrored image. In Last Dance (2025), he is pictured executing a lumbering dance step, an evasive gesture that could signal an attempt to flee the trap of representation and return to an unseen, spectral presence. Our interiority, it is suggested, is more readily interrogated when the body is secreted. Indeed, in Monkey (2024), Cherkit takes on an animistic persona that betrays an incomprehension of or uncertainty about his external self.

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. Several lines by the poet Wallace Stevens help distill the potency of this artist’s interest in illuminating wobbling fluctuations, in contrast with “rationalists.”

Rationalists, wearing square hats Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles.1

Others, like Cherkit, find themselves modeling unruly shapes, “rhomboids, cones, waving lines, ellipses.” Here, obsessional, noncompliant, and slipping forms offer something of a mirror, as they alter and age along with us.

1 Wallace Stevens, “Six Significant Landscapes,” 1916. Reprinted in Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems: Wallace Stevens, Ed. John N. Serio and Chris Beyers (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), 78-80.

Dr. Megan Kincaid is an art historian based in New York. She serves on the faculty of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.