Manuel Mathieu’s Paintings of Trauma and Desire

Pareidolia, the brain’s tendency to find familiar patterns or images in the visual world, wasn’t always understood as a natural cognitive function: finding a human face in the passing clouds was once considered a sign of losing your mind. Staring at the work of the Haitian-Canadian painter Manuel Mathieu, who lives and works mostly in Montreal, is often like having that instinct teased. What at first appears to be a haunting field of steamrolled, amorphous shapes resolves into images