Since the early 2000s, Matthieu Brouillard has developed a practice at the intersection of photography, visual arts, and cinema, moving between documentary observation and staged imagery. His work has been presented in numerous galleries, art centres, and museums in Canada and Europe, including VU, Dazibao, Oboro, Le Fresnoy, Kunsthalle Bern, PhotoforumPasquArt, and the Musée de l’Élysée.

 

He has published three photography books: Narragonie (2007), Darkness Implacable (2012), and Coming Through the Fog (2013, with Donigan Cumming). His first feature-length documentary, Regarding Gravity, premiered at the Montreal International Documentary Festival in 2017 before being presented at various festivals and institutions across Canada, Europe, and the United States. His second film, The Anguish of the Heron (2023), presented at the International Festival of Films on Art, continues his exploration of the points of friction between fiction and reality, combining documentary tension, a sense of strangeness, and a quasi-mythological dimension.

 

Drawing on the Baroque and Mannerism, his work engages bodies, objects, and spaces subjected to states of constraint, fragility, suspension, and collapse. Light sculpts uncertain presences poised at the threshold between the visible and the inscrutable.

 

Within a world of contortion and ambiguity, where the ordinary slips into strangeness, Brouillard explores the unstable zones of experience—where reality falters, forms come undone, and the image, rather than explaining the world, intensifies its enigma.