P. Mathieu – (b. 1982) is a French artist, based in Biarritz, whose abstract paintings explore the diffusion of light through an original technique of pictorial fragmentation, inviting the viewer into pure aesthetic contemplation. The process of creating a work begins with preparatory drawings, to fix the idea on paper. The artist explains that he often finds the ideas for his works when, lying in bed with his eyes closed, he lets himself be guided by the halos of light that appear behind his eyelids. He then reproduces the grid of simple geometric shapes (squares, circles, triangles, etc.) on the canvas and starts painting from the center or the lightest part. Mathieu Piffeteau favors oil paint because it reflects light and gives off vibrations that help create a hypnotic and kinetic effect. To maximize the diffusion of light and the accentuation of movement across the work, the artist developed a singular, slow and precise process: he fragments or pixelates the image by painting stroke by stroke, square after square, line after line, always with the same brush. The squares are all different, but the human eye perceives an apparently perfect pattern. The artist uses two techniques in particular to ‘give rhythm’ to his gradation and modify the intensity of the light: a short gradation, which creates a visual effect of luminous ‘blur’, and a long gradation, which creates a visual effect of luminous radiance. This meticulous technique demands a great deal of patience — it can take several months to complete a single painting. For P. Mathieu, the repetition of gesture and the time spent on the work help to give it meaning, as he continues to question the role of the artist, his relationship with the observer, and the impact of our culture and society on contemporary art.