Sensory impression claims a position of overwhelming importance in the work of Didier Mahieu. His plastic writing is steeped in a powerful “regressive energy” which allows access to a succession of raw sensations (heat and cold, attraction and repulsion and the like). In this way, Art as a means of profound investigation leads the artist on the road to the discovery of his roots. Approaching the world by way of the senses shows us a “background world”, that of our internal cosmos. Didier Mahieu compares this way of experiencing things with that of the child when it faces the world. In an absence of markers, the child is forced to endlessly adapt to her environment, and finds herself in a state of never-ending creation. She constantly (re)invents herself. And the child is the quintessence of the being which discovers the world through her body.

In the artist’s world, techniques intermingle and the genre rankings are shattered. It is not just that he has recourse to a range of modes of expression – this very multidisciplinarity lies at the very heart of one and the same work. This means that we can speak of a dual multidisciplinarity. Art is conceived of as a personal cross-fertilisation of practices. Mahieu multiplies the means of expression available to him to reach into the very heart of things… Open to all the visual, auditory and virtual elements, he appeals to all our senses. His work questions the relationship between the real and the imaginary and seeks to explore human perception.

Extracts from Kristel BRUSADELLI, Meta-morphoses, 2008.