Mathieu Lacroix's drawings explore a new form of constructivism built between sketch and pop art. The artist designs on paper improbable spaces that exploit the themes of the home and its intimacy, deploying all kinds of structures and furniture constantly questioned by an intermittent perspective. The space of the drawing vacillates between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality and, like crushed and flattened cardboard boxes, the logic is sputtered and distorted; the privacy is stripped bare and disturbing.

This program is built around the pure drawn form, which Lacroix perverts by confusing it with heterogeneous and disparate elements. The drawings in the series become the ground for an interaction between various generic elements, such as pictograms relating to the codes of transport of goods, animal stencils, the cliché and childish diagram of the bird represented in the shape of an m, smears, lines, straight lines and curves, solids, etc. In this spirit, even the human body is reduced to the outline, recognizable only in its general form, its outline, thus leaving all the room for its theatrical position in space. He is a weight anchored in a stopped narration.

Time is not running out, but we are not in the technical drawing so far. The forms present in these works are certainly agreed, they nevertheless speak to us in an unexpected, charming and bewitching language, and together produce a dreamlike and poetic universe. The solids deny the emerging prospects; flocks of birds wander and act as smoke, valons or waves; the psychological situation of the appearing weight is difficult to pinpoint; these complex places seem to exist only on the page and only for it.

The complexity of the constructions represented is reflected in the various materials used. Elaborated on paper connoted by its disposable aspect (construction paper or simple sheet of schoolbag, lined and perforated), the series of drawings by Lacroix are constructed with dry and oily pastel, Prismacolor pencil, lead pencil, pens, Liquid Paper, paint color samples and other collages; so many elements that intersect to articulate a graphic non-place, an imagined and improbable place.

Technical drawings debauched by the possibilities of the page, Lacroix's works are akin to the fantasies of a kid who sketches a secret landmark that he will fabricate without his parents knowing. But there is nothing to hide here. And the artist is seasoned. These improbable drawings tend to become the free plans of real installations, which Lacroix begins to stage in reality.

By Marc-Antoine K Phaneuf