For Mathilde Granveau, abstraction is a way of listening to place. Through geometric forms, layered acrylics, mirror fragments and site-responsive works, the French artist transforms patterns, symbols and architectural rhythms into contemporary compositions shaped by memory, movement and cultural encounter.
Mathilde Granveau’s artistic practice begins with a quiet but profound question: how do cultures speak before words? Long before stories are written down, they often appear through patterns, ornaments, symbols, textiles, architecture and the visual details embedded in everyday life. These forms carry memory across generations. They move through places, shift through time and continue to gather meaning as they are seen, used and reimagined.
For Granveau, these visual references are never static. She does not approach them as decorative motifs to be preserved exactly as they are, but as living languages capable of transformation. Her work explores what happens when a pattern is removed from its original context, broken apart, layered, concealed and rebuilt into a new composition. Through this process, abstraction becomes both a method of discovery and a form of translation.
Working primarily with acrylic paint, masking techniques, mixed media and mirror fragments, Granveau constructs her compositions through accumulation and revelation. She paints, covers, removes and reveals, allowing hidden structures to emerge gradually beneath the surface. The process gives her works a strong architectural rhythm, while also leaving space for intuition, movement and surprise. Precision and spontaneity coexist in her paintings, creating a visual language that feels carefully composed yet alive with energy.
Living in Vietnam has deeply shaped this direction. Since relocating to Da Nang, Granveau has developed an ongoing dialogue with the country’s visual culture. Through daily life and travel, she has encountered traditional motifs, symbolic systems, architectural details, textile traditions and vernacular aesthetics that continue to influence the way she sees form. Yet her work does not reproduce these references directly. Instead, she transforms them through abstraction, allowing traces of cultural memory to appear in new and unexpected ways.
This sensitivity to place is central to ROOTS, her 2025 solo exhibition at Maii Art Space. Developed around the themes of grounding, transformation and belonging, the collection reflects on how identity is shaped through movement, encounter and memory. For Granveau, roots are not fixed or inherited in a single direction. They are built through experience, exchange and the emotional relationships we form with the places that change us.
In ROOTS, geometric structures and symbolic motifs become a way of exploring connection as something fluid rather than permanent. Each work holds its own emotional landscape, yet together they form a broader meditation on what it means to belong while remaining in motion. The collection marked an important stage in the evolution of Granveau’s visual language, bringing together her personal experience as a French artist living in Vietnam with her wider interest in cultural transformation.
Through abstraction, Mathilde Granveau builds bridges between heritage and contemporary expression. Her paintings do not offer fixed answers about identity or belonging. Instead, they open a space where memory can move, where symbols can be reimagined, and where place becomes not only something we inhabit, but something that continues to transform us.