©Samuel Chasseur
The Michèle Schoonjans Gallery is pleased to present Chaosmos, the first solo exhibition in Belgium by Franco-Belgian artist Mathieu Bonardet, recently awarded the 2024 Matsutani Prize. This solo show marks a new milestone in his career, with the unprecedented introduction of colour into a body of work previously defined by black and white. Rigorous minimalism, an exploration of fullness and emptiness, shifts and tensions... Chaosmos reveals a drawing practice tested by the unpredictable — between order and disruption, balance and rupture. Chaosmos “Chaosmos” is a portmanteau coined by James Joyce to evoke both chaos and cosmos—the ordered world so dear to Greek thought. The emergence of colour in Mathieu Bonardet’s work opens up the possibility of moving between the two. Until now, his...
The Michèle Schoonjans Gallery is pleased to present Chaosmos, the first solo exhibition in Belgium by Franco-Belgian artist Mathieu Bonardet, recently awarded the 2024 Matsutani Prize. This solo show marks a new milestone in his career, with the unprecedented introduction of colour into a body of work previously defined by black and white. Rigorous minimalism, an exploration of fullness and emptiness, shifts and tensions... Chaosmos reveals a drawing practice tested by the unpredictable — between order and disruption, balance and rupture. Chaosmos “Chaosmos” is a portmanteau coined by James Joyce to evoke both chaos and cosmos—the ordered world so dear to Greek thought. The emergence of colour in Mathieu Bonardet’s work opens up the possibility of moving between the two. Until now, his practice—dominated by black and white—followed a rigorous logic: each drawing was constructed based on plans, sketches, and studies, in a structured search for balance centred around the horizon. Les Gouffres bears witness to this genesis, tracing the progression from the scale of the concept to its materialisation in volume—sometimes even reaching the realm of sculpture. Though traversed by faults and fracture lines, this graphite universe possesses the stability of granite blocks; the Equal Blocks—composed of two different shapes with equal surface areas, generated by software developed in collaboration with a mathematician—embody the tension between intuition and calculation, between controlled chance and precision. Here, the algorithm becomes a way of ordering the world. Order also lies in the repetition of the same. In Isometría VIII, the same format and the same drawing, repeated ten times, visually construct a horizon—the ultimate symbol of a stability that remains unattainable, except perhaps at the tip of the pencil. Yet the balance of forces and lines remains subject to geological phenomena. In this world reduced to its simplest elements—fullness and emptiness—repetition can give way to shift or slippage. This acts as an initial disruptive force, as in the Disjonction series previously shown at the gallery, where a fragment of graphite, slipped beneath the second panel of a diptych, triggered a divergence—a prelude to potential collapse. What once seemed immutable proves to be susceptible to fragility. Colour ultimately unsettles all points of reference. Its spectrum, oscillating from yellow to green, evokes a fantasised radiation—synthesising contemporary anxieties between geopolitical threat and climate disruption. The recent retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris on artists’ responses to the atomic age revealed this ambiguity: from the ethereal and physical energy transfers in Hilma af Klint’s atomic forms to the mesmerising mushroom clouds in Bruce Conner’s Crossroads. Translating this uncertainty into the very flesh of the paper, colour becomes a latent threat to drawing. It introduces the unexpected possibility of a chain reaction in Mathieu Bonardet’s practice. Instead of premeditated sketches in notebooks, intuition unfolds directly on the page. The way graphite clings to pastel then guides the drawing toward a more or less dense composition. Abrasive and at times violent, colour sets the lines under tension, aligning them along a force line they simultaneously help make visible. Because colour reacts unpredictably, sameness itself becomes impossible. This tactile and visual relationship generates layers of material—erasures, reappearances. At times, only ghost lines remain; at others, the colour nearly vanishes, drowned in graphite. Unable to preserve the matrix-like unity of the Isometrías, the Radiations scorch the page with a magnetic field or solar wind—down to the point of abrasion. Their vibration takes the risk of the uncontrollable. The gradual disruption brought on by the spread of colour in Mathieu Bonardet’s work mirrors the disorientation that overtakes the protagonist of Robert Walser’s The Walk, and then the world he perceives: "The sky and the earth flow together and merge hastily into a surging, gleaming, and confusedly shimmering mass of fog. Chaos begins and all order disappears." Here, in the visual revelation of a fusion between fullness and emptiness, we find the same unsettling sensation that grips Joyce’s protagonists—the painful epiphany of the entanglement between order and disorder. Thus opens, onto the unknown of a world beyond—blinding and empty, total and white—the strictly delineated central space of the Chaosmos series. About the Matsutani Prize Awarded annually since its creation in 2017 by artists Kate Van Houten and Takesada Matsutani, the Matsutani Prize, supported by the SHŌEN endowment fund, aims to support artists in the development of their work. In 2024, artist Hélène Delprat accepted SHŌEN’s invitation and nominated four artists with less than 20 years of career. In her words: "Among the four artists nominated for the prize, Mathieu Bonardet—through his rigour, focus, and passion for graphite black—is the one whose work most closely resonates with that of Matsutani. A great economy of means. Repetition of gestures like a ritual. A deep consideration of time. He is also interested in the movement of the body and regularly films his actions. In this way, he brings together drawing, the body, and film, and explores volume in a close relationship to his drawing. I admire his determination." Text from Xavier BourgineOpening Hours
| Monday | Closed |
| Tuesday | Closed |
| Wednesday | Closed |
| Thursday | Closed |
| Friday | Closed |
| Saturday | Closed |
| Sunday | Closed |