Manuel Mathieu Brings Ayizan to Paris
At Galerie Poggi, a Vodou spirit, the artist's own first name, gives his first solo exhibition in France its shape.
Say the title out loud and you've already taken part. Manuel Mathieu knows this, and it's part of why he chose it. Ayizan, his first solo exhibition in France, opened on 21 October at Galerie Poggi in Paris and runs until 28 November. Everyone who walks in will pronounce her name.
Ayizan is a central figure in Haitian Vodou: the first mambo, keeper of sacred knowledge and traditional medicine, protector of markets and public squares, spiritual mother of all initiates. She is also the first name Mathieu's mother gave him. He can't say why she chose it, whether for the sound or for what Ayizan stands for. For him she is a spirit, one who looks after the newly initiated in the marketplace. What he does know is why he wanted her in Paris. The city, he says, is "a very spiritual place, a very mystical place", and given the colonial past that ties France to Haiti, it felt important to bring his own spiritual legacy onto French ground and "impose a sort of incantation". "I think this is a beautiful way to underline her presence and my spiritual legacy at the same time."
He is careful not to box that legacy in. For Mathieu, spirituality is everywhere, and art is a vessel for it. Making a work means creating spiritual value, and that relates to Christianity as much as to Vodou. The work becomes "a territory, a space for us to converge". He also believes there is a reason we are born where we are, and that a place hands down something worth honouring.
You feel that in the rooms. The large canvases look abstract at first and then start to seem occupied. In Study on Death (2022), a black silhouette bends forward against orange and ochre pigment that looks poured and left to bleed. White flecks of bare canvas break through, and dark pools like eyes spread across the surface. Trois jours, un monde (2026) is split in two. Blue and amber streaks run across the upper half, the lower half settles into a pale lilac-pink edged with rust, and a cluster of glazed ceramic forms hangs from a single black cord at the centre. The ceramic returns elsewhere in the show, as if the canvases and the objects were speaking to each other.
Manuel Mathieu, Study on Death, 2022. © Photo Guy L'Heureux
The quietest piece may be the one with the most to say. Le premier sera le dernier (2026) is made of ceramic, wood and photogravure on fabric. At the Fort de Joux in the Haut-Doubs, Mathieu photographed the bed where Toussaint Louverture lay down for the last time on 7 April 1803, dead of cold and isolation, far from the island he had led towards freedom. Haiti proclaimed its independence within the year. The photograph is printed on raw cotton, a fabric the wall text links to the triangular trade: grown by enslaved hands, woven in Europe, exchanged for lives on the African coast. Putting Toussaint into that very fibre turns the material back against the history that produced it. The darkest tones settle in the hollow of the bed and thin out towards the edges of the cloth, like a memory resisting erasure. A small ceramic form rests on the wooden shelf above. The text also recalls the words Toussaint is said to have spoken, that by overthrowing him only the trunk of the tree of Black liberty had been felled, and that it would grow back from its roots.
Installation view, Ayizan, Galerie Poggi, Paris, 2026. Courtesy of Galerie Poggi
It is hard not to read the whole exhibition through that sentence. Mathieu speaks of artistic creation as "an act of quiet resistance", and of living tradition as a foundational force that endures. He describes the show as a gathering he wishes to celebrate in Paris, around cultural richness and the depth and complexity of carrying a shared history. In his work, abstraction becomes the invisible string linking personal experience to shared memory. In Ayizan, that string runs from a spirit invoked in Haiti as a figure of protection, including during the independence struggle that began in 1791, to a city that holds part of the same history.
His work was also shown at Art Basel Paris, where Galerie Poggi's booth at the Grand Palais presented new paintings and drawings alongside works by Kapwani Kiwanga. But the full exhibition, where the name is spoken and the history is made visible, remains at the gallery.
Galerie Poggi booth, Art Basel Paris 2026. Photo: Younes Lagrouni
Manuel Mathieu. Photo © Matteo Losurdo
Ayizan is on view at Galerie Poggi, Paris, until 28 November 2026.
