Mathieu Briand: A Pirate’s Life

TRUNCATED TORSOS, swarming rats, monstrous ogres, ramshackle shacks. Plotting tables, video projections, aquariums, acid, silver cast figurines, jigsaw puzzles, polyamide prints, leather… No matter where one looks, Mathieu Briand’s oeuvre throws you a curve ball. Hints of gothic horror, sadism and masochism, anarchy, science fiction, legends and myths all jostle for space.

While there may be whiffs of melancholy running through these works, there is also wit and humour aplenty. His 2019 Etant Donnés is an obvious play on one of Marcel Duchamp’s more infamous works, but here Briand crosses Duchamp’s iconic image with the equally iconic sci-fi of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner. Then again, it may be Hans Bellmer via Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s Gigantor.

Briand is a Melbourne-based artist hailing from Marseille, France. His work has been described by his international dealer gallery ARNDT as “situated somewhere between perceptive reality and a displacement of the imagination”. His images are riddled with fictions. However, the most poignant of these was in fact a reality. In 2008, the artist embarked on a quest to find a small, uninhabited island along the lines of the fictional pirate lair of Libertalia from an 18th-century book by Captain Charles Johnson. However instead of pirates, Briand’s island would be an anarchic haven for like-minded artists. To be sure, Briand found his isle off the coast of Madagascar. “It was quite close, so I decided to swim,” he says. “But I misjudged and underestimated the tides. I was exhausted when I got there.”

When he arrived, he discovered the island wasn’t as unpopulated as he hoped and indeed, a local family-held dominion. Undaunted, he befriended the father of the small tribe and the family allowed Briand and his small brigand of artist friends to run amok, clearly bemused by their antics, although at times suspecting them of devil worship.

But this is Briand’s raison d’être – to embrace the unexpected. “I’ve always been an anarchist at heart,” he says, going on to cite the work of the American anarchist author Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey, who advocated the concept of “temporary autonomous zones” – areas of complete creative freedom. Like Bay, Briand says that he long ago decided to “refuse to wait for a revolutionary moment”, favour- ing spontaneity and anarchy over ponderous theory.

In this zone, references to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey can sit alongside a marooned 15th-century ship in outer space. But Briand also has no hesitation in citing Gauguin and Matisse as equal influences. “I am totally against this idea that every- thing has to be new and young,” he states vehemently.

Briand’s forthcoming show at Melbourne’s MARS Gallery in August – a show that sees the artist take over the entire gallery space – is just the latest in a series of presentations in major institutions and galleries across the globe. He has exhibited Centre Pompidou and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; REDCAT in Los Angeles; Tate Modern in London; and Museo Jumex in Mexico, to name just a few. He received the first prize of the Biennale of Istanbul in 2001 and has created a number of permanent installations, including in China and Japan.

In Australia his work has already cropped up at the Centre for Contemporary and ACMI in Melbourne, at Spring 1883 with ARNDT; and in the solo show Et In Libertalia Ego, Vol.II at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart.

MATHIEU BRIAND, WHEN OUR HEART SINKS DEEPLY ON THE UNCANNY ISLAND, SHOWS AT MARS GALLERY, MELBOURNE, FROM 10 AUGUST TO 7 SEPTEMBER 2019.