Matthieu was born in Châteauroux, France, and studied at the European Acting School, Cours Florent, in Paris.
He has expanded his creative work through photography, filmmaking, and performance art. His recent work explores various media, including alcohol ink, collages, and pastels, and has been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions at art galleries such as envoy enterprises, Empirical Nonsense, and La MaMa Galleria in New York.
Matthieu has appeared in a number of notable independent and international films, including Coelho Mau, which premiered at the 70th Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Queer Palm. His performance in Um Fio De Baba Escarlate — a “Giallo serial killer fever dream” directed by Portuguese filmmaker Carlos Conceição — earned him the CinEuphoria Award for Best Actor in 2022. Both films, directed by Conceição, have received multiple awards across Europe and the United States.
His other prominent work includes a recurring supporting role in Kurt Sutter’s FX drama series The Bastard Executioner, alongside Stephen Moyer and Katey Sagal, as well as short film Les Nouvelles Folies Françaises from French director Thomas Blanchard.
Other artists Matthieu has worked with include photographers Nicolas Wagner and Ricardo Gomes, singer-songwriter Frank Ocean, painter and photographer Pierre et Gilles, and creative director Nicola Formichetti. His work has been featured in publications such as Out, V, i-D, Les Inrockuptibles, BUTT, CRUSH, Citizen K, and Têtu.
He is based in New York City.
Through diverse practice including film, installation, performance and photography, Matthieu Charneau examines the symbolic and emotional aspects of situations and places, personal history and collective memory.
One of his recurring themes is the nature of time. Fascinated by how and why a particular moment in time stands out and how it relates to specific points of arrival and departure, he foregrounds historical consciousness through a multiple focus on the present and crucial pasts.
How do twists and turns of individual fates fit into theories of time, place, and the meaning of human lives? By asking himself that question, his work becomes a balancing act between interconnectedness and the search of lost time.
Much like Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu,” Charneau depicts his journey through an allegorical search for truth with metaphors that enrich a collective pictorial language.
He often incorporates stills from Super 8 films and digital recordings into sequences, which appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. More symbol and metaphor than narrative, it expresses Charneau’s need to remember and record how one fragment of a single moment in time leads to the next.
His preference for using available light, blurring and graininess has figures dissolving into shadow and film grain. They stand as timeless fragments of life, moments of intimacy, exploring the tension between idealism and existential realities.
The complexity of Matthieu Charneau’s work is as much about the cycle of creation, destruction and regeneration as it is about continuity and cosmic redundancy.
— Jimi Dams
envoy enterprises