Reviews, Essays and Art Catalogues

But Now! 2013. Kent Buchanan. Catalogue essay.

Mathieu Gallois’ project Wellington asks us to re-examine contact between the European colonists and the Indigenous peoples of Australia in the early 1800s. Wellington is a regional New South Wales town, once the furthest point of the burgeoning colony in 1817. Known as binjang to the local wiradjuri, the Wellington Valley sits at the junction of the Bell (bilabang) and Macquarie (wambool) Rivers, and is nestled at the base of Mounts Arthur, Wellesley and Duke.

Where the heart is. 2010. Jo Walker. Frankie magazine. Issue #34.

When most people see a "For Sale" sign on a house they think of mortgages, floor space, even that semi-illicit thrill of turning up to an auction when you've no intention of bidding or even looking over a contract. But two years ago Mat Gallois, Caroline Comino and Vesna Trobec saw something else. They saw a pile of money just waiting to be turned into shelter for people in the developing world. One house that could become 1000 homes...

Monument to Memory: Woomera in Australian contemporary art. 2008. Veronica Tello. Art Monthly Australia, Issue 208.

Mathieu Gallois’s work, Containment (2006), functions as a portal to the void of empathy created by Reith, Ruddock and Howard. The work is a sculptural installation constructed of cyclone fencing, galvanised pipe and razor wire. Containment aims to create an architectonic space that provokes us into imagining living in containment – in a detention centre or, quite literally, a cage.

Wrapped in Rhetoric: Musings on ‘politics’. 2006. Anthony Gardner. ‘Rapt in Rhetoric’. Broad Sheet. Vol. 35, No. 3.

I briefly want to highlight two particular works here, both of which are performative in their relation to local politics. The first is Mathieu Gallois’ Containment (2006), a reconstruction in cyclone wire of cells in a detention centre. The turn to mediatised politics is clear: these camps for holding asylum seekers (and others) have long been a hot potato for Australian politicians and journalists alike.

Waking the Neighbours: The Art of Mathieu Gallois. 2004. Jeff Gibson. ‘Feature review’. Monument Architectural Journal. Issue 60.

Though he may call Australia home, artist and aspiring architect, Mathieu Gallois, is an international citizen. The son of an itinerant French banker who worked for a large multinational corporation, he has lived for more than a year at a time in nine cities, spanning six countries and four continents. Siding with his mother’s feminist principles after his parents separated when he was ten years of age, Gallois subsequently spent formative years being shuttled between the politicized maternal home and the far flung locales of his father’s capitalist calling. Is it any wonder then that his art should grapple—in a deeply skeptical manner—with such topics as domestic architecture, social breeding, travel, and globalization.

Homefront: The house in new Australian sculpture. 2003. Maria Bilski. ‘Homefront: The home in Australian art’. COFA website.

In 1998, Sydney artist Mathieu Gallois installed a polystyrene facade of a house on an empty lot in a new suburban housing sub-development. Frontier (1998) was a painstakingly exact recreation of a kit-home facade; the proportions of the house were reproduced exactly - down to every roof tile. On its generous allotment of land surrounded by newly erected homes, Frontier was a monument to the ideal of suburbia; a pristine vision of the perfect house, glowing a dazzling white, selling the dream. But it also worked as a criticism of the suburban lifestyle of conformity, where congruity is paramount in the attempt to create the 'perfect' neighbourhood - a sort of Truman-town.

Virtually Yours, The Art of Mathieu Gallois. 2001. Anthony Gardner. (Excerpt) ‘Virtualization: The convergence of Virtuality and Digitality in Contemporary Australian Art and Architectural Representation’. Unpublished M.A. Thesis, School of Fine Art, Uni Melb.

What does it mean to live in a virtual world and a virtual age? Does it mean to exist in a plain reducible to VR, ambient digital television and the like - where everything is information, movements can be algorhythmically encoded and people are merely statistics of use? Or can virtuality be understood as separate from the digitality through which we define it in the twenty-first century?

Flesh. 2001. Maria Bilski.. C-International Contemporary Art Magazine.

Hollywood has caused us to think of mirages as hallucinations. Their appearance in films signals that an actor, overcome by desert heat, has lost touch with reality, or at least the reality of the film. In actuality, mirages are not formed by the imagination, but are a manipulation of the truth – a trick of the light where everything seen exists but is often distorted an might be miles from the place where it is seen.

Oasis Onanisme. 2001.  Chris Chapman. ‘Flesh’. Catalogue essay. Experimental Arts Foundation, Adelaide. (Excerpt)  

"Because blue is the complimentary colour of flesh tone (a principle that makes it the favoured background hue in Chroma Key special effects), Gallois' mise en scene floats in a space that seems ambivalent to human life. As much as the content of the installation might promise titillating possibilities, the stage set withdraws from the viewer, quietly folding in on itself. Once again, it is not so much a pointed criticism or analytical position that underlines it meaning. Instead, Gallois has created an ambient sense of alienation which functions as a pure block of sensation."

Cast Away. 2001. Stephen O'Connell. ‘Flesh’. Catalogue essay. Experimental Arts Foundation, Adelaide. (Excerpt) 

Mathieu Gallois' ambitious installation offered an enigmatic and perceptually compelling experience. The work was a life size 'film set' depicting a desert oasis (with plushly-decorated tent, palm trees and sand). The scene was placed on a large studio set-like platform with a curved back painted in Chroma Key blue.

Placelessness. 2000. Ben Curnow. ‘Flight 934-B.’ Catalogue essays.

The transferral of the seating plan aboard a Boeing 747 passenger jet to the flat plane of the gallery wall, in Flight 934-B, is disarmingly literal. Close to four hundred separate photographs – individual portraits of the passengers on a transcontinental flight - make up a composite image, which is an abstraction of the aeroplane.

Aircraft Body / Social Body. 2000. Blair French. ‘Flight 934-B’. Catalogue essays.

Both aircraft and airport as quintessential mainframe processors of societal flows have in recent years become ubiquitous subjects of (and sites for) contemporary art. But rarely does the ‘passenger’ feature as either individuated subject or class of social organisation as here in Matt Gallois’ Flight 934-B. Why so?

In every dream home, an artwork. 1998. Bruce James. ‘Frontier’. The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 November.

Though I saw his homage to Home Beautiful in its wrecked condition, it moved and challenged me greatly. What became apparent, seeing Frontier in its homey context, was its spiritual aspect. In this, it differed fundamentally from the three-bedroom hell-hole that featured in The Boys.