Matthieu Schaeffer

Matthieu Schaeffer (born in 1998) came to painting by an unconventional route. An engineer trained at EPFL and later at ISAE-SUPAERO, where he wrote a thesis on the aerodynamics of dragonfly wings, he began painting as a self-taught artist in 2023. From his scientific background, he retains an experimental approach to image-making: every surface is a problem of light to be solved.

His animals look as though they have stepped out of a display case. Painted in acrylic and airbrush, with no visible trace of the artist’s hand, they possess the sheen of collectible porcelain: fur, skin and feathers become glaze. In his recent paintings, their bodies swell into proportions reminiscent of Fernando Botero, lending themselves to absurd scenes: balancing on their heads, a hunt suggested but never shown, all set against backdrops that remain perfectly serious.

This contrast first creates comedy, then a sense of unease. These rounded, glossy animals borrow the visual language of everything we manufacture to love animals without ever having to encounter them: natural history museum dioramas, collectible figurines, mascots on product packaging. Schaeffer paints not so much wildlife itself as our desire to possess it, to freeze it in place, to make it endearing and ultimately consumable. His humour initially disarms the viewer, before confronting each of us with our own desire to take the animal home.

One is reminded of Henri Rousseau for his imagined forests, Hockney for his use of colour, Maurizio Cattelan’s taxidermied animals, and Jeff Koons’s inflated, reflective sculptures. Yet perhaps the earliest influence lies in a childhood spent in Kenya, between the ages of two and five, visiting national parks: the animal admired from afar, the one that cannot be touched.