The smell hits you before anything else. Entering Manuel Mathieu’s corner of the Arsenale at the 61st Venice Biennale, you enter a dimly lit room and you are greeted by an earthy scent: vetiver, from Haiti, mixed with something unexpectedly comforting. It took me a while to place it, but its sweet scent finally got there—the Vicks VapoRub my mother used to rub on my chest when I had a cold as a child, that strong, enveloping feeling of care. Focused installation happening around you, The Pendulum (2025), however, is more troubling than comforting.
Haitian-Canadian artist Mathieu is one of the few participants in this year’s Biennale exhibition at both the Arsenal and the Giardini—an act that speaks to the breadth and ambition of a practice that includes painting, mosaic, ceramics, film and the arts of smell. Invited by the late curator Koyo Kouoh, whose theme “In Small Keys” privileges the quiet ways of resisting grand proclamation, Mathieu’s first exhibition at the world’s most prestigious art fair feels limited.
The Pendulum began as a short film in 2023—winning the top prize at FIFA that year before touring the New Orleans Film Festival, the Toronto Biennial of Art and the Pérez Art Museum Miami—before expanding into the immersive installation now presented here. At Arsenal, it takes the form of a two-sided screen suspended in a dark space, and is joined by four life-sized cloth figures lying on the floor, each emitting the scent of vetiver.
On the screen, a woman in a white dress and hat walks through the forest, the fabric of her dress following her like a wedding train. From time to time he opens the cloak—arms outstretched, as if he might escape; to others it is wrapped around itself like a protective garment. When I described her to Mathieu as the bride of history, he lit up. “That’s it,” she said. “And when are you getting married?” It’s a question the profession deliberately refuses to answer. The dress itself—or something close to it—stands next to the mannequin, a cinematic relic suddenly made three-dimensional.
The film is cut, and we are in the field. A group of men maneuvers a large white sheet between them, tossing and wrapping it around what appear to be broken dolls like those in the Arsenal space—dismembered and severed limbs. The action is repetitive, tiresome and oddly familiar; it reminded me, to me, of those parachute games from school PE lessons, where the point was to communicate collaboratively and the rules were never entirely clear. Men don’t talk to each other. It doesn’t seem to connect at all. They continue anyway. “They can stop at any time, but they don’t,” said Mathieu. For him, the loop is a message: the inability of people to express their inner knowledge to each other is what keeps the loop from turning.
Dolls mean different things to different people—one of the actors saw them as white souls; one was not comfortable calling them. For Mathieu, they represent mental burdens. The question is not what they are but how each person chooses to carry them. The woman who opens the film, carrying the weight of all that fabric, passes it on. Men accept it and don’t know what to do with it. Vetiver, found in the fragrance house with access to materials grown in Haiti, is designed to make you want to live within that uncertainty. “A scent that can hug you,” as Mathieu puts it.
The decision to pair such a potentially controversial film with something so soothing is a masterpiece. Olfaction bypasses the analytical brain, Mathieu argues, going directly to memory and emotion. The scent also exists beyond the gallery walls—Mathieu is the founder of Manuel Mathieu Parfums, and the vetiver blend is available as a candle, meaning visitors can take not only the memory of the exhibition but its spirit into their homes. Some will take it literally: the scent lingers on skin and clothes long after you leave, which feels completely intentional for a work whose main argument is that history doesn’t stay where you left it.
From Arsenal to Giardini, the scale and medium change but the concerns remain the same. The body (2023) consists of 14 vases in different stages of collapse—forms held in a state of flux, instability and dissolution, as if what they contained had already begun to disappear. Handcrafted during the residency in Jingdezhen, China, they are intentionally imperfect, visible signs of making (original handprints) have been preserved on the surface. Mathieu describes the firing process as a metaphor for transformation—how heat creates new forms, creates cracks, and can destroy while preserving essential elements. He said his team broke the clay oven because the work was too busy. They work like archaeological pieces, they suggest buried histories instead of depicting them, and they demand a different attention than paintings: you want to reach out and feel their weight.
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“MANUEL MATHIEU” |
The same earthy, geological quality permeates it Plenty and drought (2024), a large-scale mosaic that reads from a distance as something ground and basic—a fractured surface, almost skull-like in its contours—before zooming in, where the patient piled up thousands of pieces assembled by hand slowly reveal themselves. The work was developed as part of a study of Le Mont habité, Mathieu’s permanent commission of five monumental sculptures of Montréal’s REM transportation network. “Slowness is not forced,” said Mathieu, “but it comes from the natural difficulty of the work.” Both works share a sense of time made visible in the material—the work is the meaning—and in an exhibition environment that often rewards spectacle and speed, which feels as much a position as a process.
Paintings around it—Self preservation (2025), In the heart of the Revolution II (2025) and new Genocide (2026)—are composed of layers of canvas, paper, paint and, increasingly, burnt fabric, something Mathieu has incorporated into his work over the past few years. This window (2025) and The veil (2025) both use strips of fabric that hang close to or are attached to the painted surface, creating edges rather than focused images: the figures appear distorted, as if seen through a glass or through memory itself. In The veilThe burnt cotton is pressed directly into the paint, hide and pierce the image below. Fabric has a certain historical guilt—cotton is inseparable from the economy of enslaved workers—and to burn it is to reject its original function, to transform the commodity of exploitation into something else: a scar, a fracture, a rejection.
Genocide it stopped me in my tracks—not least because of the context I encountered. The day before the Biennale’s official opening, the Art Not Genocide Alliance coordinated walkouts in at least a dozen national venues to protest Israel’s participation. To move from that watery space to the room that contained the painting of that subject—its face arranged like a damaged grid of archival images, a face that pressed against layers of fragile paper only to melt and be pulled away—was to feel the weight of the word arrive in real time. At the bottom right of the canvas, suspended from a black cord, hangs an object curved like a sickle, but with a certain linear quality of bone. It’s hard to say exactly what it is, and Mathieu seemed content to leave it at that. “It could be a tool,” he said, “it could be a remnant of that violence—a byproduct of that violence.” The ambiguity is the point: whether it’s the murder weapon or its remains, something has happened here.
“It’s an erasure tool that’s used more than ever these days,” Mathieu said plainly when we spoke. The painting does not depict a single event but covers the genocide over a long period of time, linking brutal photo documentation with its gradual failure to capture meaning at all times: images fade and records become illegible. The subterranean surface is present but not identified, echoing Mathieu’s earlier work, 1954/Flats and Sharps (2016), referencing the year François Duvalier came to power in Haiti, its colorful forms pierced by black sandy voids act as virtual black holes, representing lives and narratives erased by violence. Genocide he extended that language to the present tense. For Mathieu, these are not separate histories but a single pattern, repeating itself under different names, in different places and over centuries.
His performance in both these areas, emphasizes that history is not the past. It’s a loop—like the men in the field, like the recurring structures of governance that he traces from the Haitian dictatorship to the violence of that time—that continues until someone finds the language to name it, or better yet, to stop it. Whether art can provide that language is a question he wisely leaves open. What it can do, this exhibition convincingly argues, is to make the loop visible: in the weight of a ceramic vessel, in the slow accumulation of mosaic tiles, in the scrim of burnt cotton pressed with paint, in the fragrance it emits from the building and the earth.
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