Matthieu Darrasse, artiste
Painter · Open air · Performance
Each project starts with a simple question. What if we froze the sunset, as in the French children's game 1, 2, 3, soleil? What if the great orators had painted while they spoke? What if the pedestrian crossings of Paris started to think? What if a sailing boat became a studio for a year? Once the question is asked, each project has its own rules of the game: three pastels side by side, an orator's gestures replayed on the canvas, one sentence per crossing, one work per day at sea. And when the tool is missing, you make it.
1, 2, 3 Coucher de soleil
Like the French children's game 1, 2, 3, soleil, where the word for sun is the signal to freeze, I hold the sunset still. Three times, from life, in dry pastel from La Maison du Pastel, across the hour and a half that leads to nautical twilight. Side by side, the three panels show what one alone cannot: there are several sunsets inside a single sunset.
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The Art of Speech
What if the great orators held brushes while they spoke? I learn their gestures by heart, then replay them facing the canvas, to the sound of their voices. Only the marks remain, and they are enough: without knowing who spoke, you can tell the man of peace from the dictator.
View the speeches →
Think Don't Think
American pedestrian signals say WALK or DON'T WALK. Paris, 2003: the crossings will say THINK, DON'T THINK. Every night, large stencils rolled across the asphalt turn the white bars into lines of writing, one sentence chosen for each place. Filmed the next day, passers-by stop and answer back. Published in Eye Magazine, the international reference for graphic design.
See the pedestrian crossings →
Le Grand Tour en Pleine Mer
A solo tour of the Atlantic, aboard a ketch turned into a studio. Painting every day, from life, and letting the sea decide what the day gives: the sky, the open water, a port of call. Close to 300 works over a year at sea, each dated and placed along the route, to be followed on a nautical chart drawn for the project. Leaving Concarneau, in 2029 or 2030.
Website in progress, 2026 Follow the voyage →The route
Concarneau, Spain, Portugal, Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde, then the Caribbean, Cuba and the American east coast up to New York and the Hudson. Home by the northern route: Maine, Nova Scotia, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Newfoundland and Ireland. Thirty-six ports of call, close to twelve thousand miles, a year at sea.
The works
Close to 300 oil paintings over a year, all from life, in port and on the open sea alike. Each carries its date and position, and holds one precise point on the route.
The boat
An Amel Maramu ketch, 13.80 m, whose aft cabin will become the studio: a fixed easel, a ventilated locker for drying the oils, and a seat that compensates for the heel.
The model
Works can be reserved in advance on the nautical chart. Exhibitions at the main ports of call during the voyage, then a full show on return, before the works are handed over.
Background
I had an artistic practice from a very young age, long before becoming an art director or even entering Penninghen. The profession was added to the practice, not the other way round. Penninghen, the school that inherited the Académie Julian, taught me drawing and rigour. Much later, art history at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne gave me the references: not to learn how to paint, but to know where one paints, and after whom.
Delacroix came first. I read his Journal long before university, and there I understood what an artist's life is: the doubt, the daily work, the attention paid to other painters. Rubens came later, through my studies. Two colourists of genius. Delacroix preferred sketches to large paintings, because in them you can see the painter searching. That is what I look for too when I paint from life, with no second take.
Art history did the rest: artists, movements, ways of painting and thinking. Constable, for instance, with his sky studies, showed me what open-air painting has that nothing can replace. I feed on all of it: on what others painted before me, and on what I have learned by painting.
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my work?
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