Mathieu Karsenti
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Apr 26
- 6 min read
Mathieu Karsenti moves between sound and image without drawing a line between them. His paintings come together through rhythm, instinct, and repetition. Some start with collage, others begin as marks on paper. He lets things shift as he works. What comes out feels like something remembered, not described—built from movement, not plans. There’s no fixed message, just space to notice, feel, and come back to. Like in music, meaning sits somewhere between the parts.
Q: In "Black and White Explorations 2", you describe letting your subconscious fully take over. What did you discover about your process by working in that kind of complete free flow?
A: In my practice, I always look for new ways of depicting my internal abstract landscapes. For me, it’s akin to composing for different instruments, and with "Black and White Explorations 2" (part of a series), I wanted to paint without collage as the starting point. I wanted to let my subconscious take over any technique. I wanted to let it guide me where it needed to go, and for that, my only conscious decision was to use black and white first so that color would not distract me. What I discovered was a certain freedom of movement and an ease for composing the image. The result is also channelling my love of Japanese calligraphy! I love the intent, the gesture of calligraphy, and certainly that became my approach at that time: to strike the blank space with a definite purpose, strong and bold, almost also like a meditation. The abstract results—lines in motion offset by textures and blank space—felt satisfying to me. I could see shapes, impressions, whirlwinds, dancers, etc… As always with my work, it is open to interpretation!
Q: Your "Untitled" series feels like a cross between visual improvisation and musical composition. How do sound and rhythm find their way into your visual work?
A: Again, using my subconscious to guide me is key to my work. By subconscious, I also mean that ‘special’ creative place we enter where we disconnect from reality to let our instinct take over. And music allows me to do that more easily. Regardless of whether a piece of music moves me or not, I find that it informs my art almost at a molecular level.
I have a mild form of synesthesia (or chromesthesia) where I can see/feel music in terms of colors and shapes. For instance, an A minor chord looks like it should be a deep red to me, D major is yellow, and depending on the context, it can also appear as bright cobalt blue. It’s completely arbitrary, but I find it useful when I paint! String sounds are soft and bold free-flowing lines, and percussions feel like they translate as dots or sharp lines, maybe angular movements. A textured sound such as a drone or the close sound of a bowed string feels like it is a roughly brushed surface. And so, taking all this into account, my work is also totally improvised, but it is done so with technique (whether my musical or visual technique) underpinning everything. What we see as a lyrical collection of shapes, lines, and colors, etc. is actually really carefully thought out. It is composed in the same way that one composes music.
Q: You often begin with collage—cutouts, textures, fragments—and then build into abstraction with watercolor and pencil. What is it about collage that opens the door for your imagination?
A: I find collage is akin to sampling in music, where you use, say, a pre-recorded violin line and build a track around it, or similarly when using a drum loop. In my last album, "Strings Reworks", I took old violin, viola, and cello takes I already composed on past releases and decided to explore ‘mashing them up’, recontextualising those arrangements to create something new out of them. I found a correlation in my visual practice with the very same approach. Like a magpie, I fumble through old magazines, usually looking for textures, lines, and anything that attracts my eye. Sometimes I might use some of my own discarded paintings. By juxtaposing fragments from unrelated sources, I find that it triggers a new challenge in me: how to make sense of these? How can I extrapolate what I see to create something different?
It’s a totally refreshing approach for me. Collage also provides an inspiration for the color palette and where to take the painting. It basically provides me with visual words from which I can develop a new form of language in the context of the painting.
Q: You mention that your compositions are “reviewed and edited one by one” like music. What does visual editing mean for you in a medium that feels so instinct-driven?
A: I approach my visual compositions like I do my music ones. It starts off with being instinctive, letting the creative flow do its thing. Because my technique is always there, I don’t have to worry whether the music or the visual will make sense—I can let my imagination take over fully.
And in that sense, it is totally instinct-driven at the onset. Reviewing and editing comes bit by bit as I try to make sense of what I’ve done.
Once I’ve found the direction, it becomes a matter of strengthening certain parts and deciding to leave other ones as they are. Like in writing, the saying ‘good writing is rewriting’, the same applies to my work on the whole. Maybe it comes from my background in applied arts and being able to paint and draw figuratively. That background wants to verify and approve of those markings so that they become fully formed and valid, like a well-defined abstraction.
In my music, there is also a certain amount of editing that has to take place to make sure each piece is playable by a musician. In my art, the editing allows me to consolidate and be more definite about my ideas.
Q: There’s a noticeable tension between control and spontaneity in your pieces. How do you know when a work is finished or when to stop?
A: That tension is always there and I relish it! My choice of water-based paint (ink and watercolor) is not only because it dries quickly. Even though one tries to control where the water goes, it still has a life of its own with surprising results. With oil or acrylics, I found that I wasn’t getting the lightness and delicate touch I needed. It felt too heavy-handed, and of course, it is a thick medium that allows you to rework and control, with sometimes overworked results for me! With water-based paint, I have to tread lightly and delicately. My approach is more elegant and almost evanescent. I feel like a dancer that improvises each step.
I generally know instinctively when a work is finished—when all the different parts are in balance and when the whole feels cohesive. The markings also have to work with the white space, which is very important to me. Debussy said: “Music is the silence between the notes.” Similarly, art is the white space that helps me to create the painting. In that respect, whilst I work, I always take into account that important space because I know I can’t edit it later on. So it’s a controlled spontaneity that exists within a framework.
Q: Coming from a background in scoring for film and TV, how does your visual art fulfill something that music alone doesn’t?
A: Like I mentioned, having this constant connection between those two worlds means that they both inform each other all the time. They complete each other. Where music is an abstract thing that makes us feel, dance, cry, etc., it is not necessarily visual unless we actively engage our imagination with it. So when I compose to picture, I have the visual there to inform me, but when I compose without a picture, I have to paint something more visual in me to depict ‘moments’, imagined abstract scenes. My abstract art allows me to try and interpret how I hear music in a more instinctual way. We don’t know what music looks like. We don’t often know why a piece moves us, but I find it fascinating to think there are a myriad of different ways one can try and paint what we hear.
Sometimes, too, I like the idea of letting art create its own ‘visual music’. If you look intently at my abstract paintings and you are willing to imagine, you might start to ‘hear’ what you see…
Art fulfills that part of me that sometimes needs something tangible, something I can touch like paint and paper. Music is a medium that informs your brain, your subconscious, your emotions—but as such, you can’t touch it. Making art in this traditional manner allows me to stay grounded, especially so in this digitally dominated era we live in.
