Mathilde Rosier’s oeuvre arguably skirts the line between real and fiction. Not in the sense of plausible but fake alternative histories or but rather, hers are theatrical renderings in film, performance, painting or sculpture. The cultivation of illusion and ambiguity, as a counter to the concrete veracity of factual things, is one of Mathilde Rosier’s persistent concerns. The artworks that result seem decidedly uncontemporary; without attempting to be nostalgic per se, they appear out of our time or quaint. Pastel-colored watercolors of birds attached to hats, melodic musical scores, videos permeated with the haze of twilight: the artist would tell you that her art sits at the limit of the “acceptable,” as it is at times too charmingly pretty and too apparently inoffensive to fit in an art world that often privileges other qualities. But behind the apparent naivety of her fantastical world is a force that deceives or, indeed, that makes deception the very thread that binds her work together.

Mathilde Rosier was born in 1973 in Paris and currently lives and works in Burgundy and Berlin.