Matthieu Schaeffer

There are artists who choose to depict nature, and then there is Matthieu Schaeffer, who chooses to reinvent it. Not to copy it, but to fabricate an alter ego. A sister-nature, familiar, yet whose essence has shifted elsewhere.
For him, the living is not reproduced: it is recomposed.

The animals and plants look like toys, like figurines taken from an industrial dream. They have the softness of plastic, the roundness of cardboard, the sheen of a manufactured object... yet they breathe. You feel them on the verge of moving, as if they were waiting for you to look away.

This disquiet, Matthieu embraces and seeks it. He walks deliberately along the ridge line where the real and the artificial merge, where one no longer knows whether one is looking at a living model or a display creature. He paints living forms with dead material; he breathes movement into what should remain still. The result is that rare moment when the illusion begins to beat. The passage from virtual to gesture, from 3D to pigment, is for him an almost carnal act: the flat areas lift, the volumes take shape, and an entire world appears where there was nothing.

This world, he began it while locked in a hospital room. For three months, he looked at nature from a distance: a tree through the window, a sky behind glass, a plant seen on television. The living was missing, the air was missing, presence was missing. So he decided to fabricate a garden. A false garden, of course, but one that would be his own.

An idealised nature, filtered, distorted by desire. A nature that does not exist, but that would allow him, at least, to breathe.
One then understands why his animals look both real and impossible.
Why his landscapes evoke childhood games as much as the dreams of an adult trying to restore order. Why everything seems painted, yet everything seems alive. There is a gesture of repair, of reconstruction, almost of autonomy: recreating what one can no longer touch.

One enters his garden as one enters a lucid dream, where everything is false but everything rings true. Perhaps that is the strength of Matthieu Schaeffer: holding up a mirror in which nature returns to us transformed, simplified, embellished, almost naïve... yet charged with a desire for life that is, itself, real.