Mathieu Forget - LEVITATION

The LEVITATION exhibition presents for the first time in museum a retrospective of French artist Mathieu Forget, through a selection of 80 photographs devoted to the movement. An invitation to discover a singular practice, both physical and contemplative, anchored in the real and tense towards the elusive.

For about ten years, Mathieu Forget, also known as Forgetmat or The Flying Man, has been pursuing the same question with an almost silent obstination: what happens in the body, and in the image, at the precise moment when you leave the ground? A dancer, photographer and director, he is both behind the goal and in front, as a subject.

Each image starts as a scenario: place, costume, light, choreography. Everything is thought out before the jump. When it starts, it is a sporting challenge as well as an artistic performance. Then comes the retouch, worked as a painter works the color and shadows, to give a second life at the moment.

During this ephemeral flight of half a second, he escaped from the world around him. Suspended between earth and sky, out of time, it floats and lives a magical moment. Then, when he falls back, he returns to the real world, and contemplates photography with a different look. It’s not him anymore. It is a body suspended in the air, an expression, a gesture, a desire, a dream, an emotion. Sensible to lines, shapes and colors, it sublimates the places crossed, the bodies, the light. The less there are elements in the frame, the more dense the sensations.

There is nothing to do with the trick: each image is torn to a fraction of a second where the physical effort joins an artistic necessity. This may be where the singularity of Mathieu Forget resides, make the gesture an image, and the image something almost tangible.

LEVITATION brings together a decade of work. From New York to Istanbul, from Paris to Los Angeles, to the expanses of Antarctica, through the Middle East and Japan, is a sensitive geography. Each place imposes its light, its silence, its resistance, and the gesture remains the same, unchanged, as a signature engraved in the air. But what is revealed here is not a map of the world, it is a portrait of a man who seeks, at every jump, to lose himself to find himself better.

Mathieu Forget invites you to let yourself be carried in the art of Levitation and to travel in his imagination. The time of an exhibition, let the ground fall under your feet.