Dates｜June 21 – July 13, 2025
Venue｜MEM  map
Hours｜13:00 – 19:00
Closed | Monday (Open if Monday is a public holiday, closed the following weekday)
Phone | 03-6459-3205

Opening Reception｜June 21 (Sat.), 17:00–19:00
Online artist talks and other programming will be announced on the website and social media.

This exhibition is the fourth installment of Matsui Chie’s ongoing Picture series, which began in 2017.

Following the previous exhibition, Pictures and Their Friends—Between Curtains, this show features works in pastel (the primary medium for this iteration), as well as watercolor-based mixed techniques, oil painting, and neon. The title, Richabelle Aterre, comes from a work Matsui created last year. Using a monotype printmaking technique, the original image was transferred in reverse, revealing a mirrored, fictional world. To the inhabitant of this imagined world, Matsui gave the name Richabelle Aterre, a name spun from her imagination.

This exhibition unfolds as a stage for the world where Richabelle Aterre resides, with a short narrative serving as an entry point into that realm. The subtitle of the exhibition, That Which Utters, That Which Suppresses, evokes the emotional tension embedded within the works, feelings that, for Matsui, took shape as a kind of silent pressure. These sensibilities are linked to the world Aterre dwells, brought into relation through the mediating presence of the ‘Picture.’

物語「リチャペル・アテルの誕生日」

Artist Statement for Picture – Richabelle Aterre

That Which Utters, That Which Suppresses

The name Richabelle Aterre included in the title of this exhibition originates from a painting I created last year.

The work was made using a monotype printing technique, which captures the world on the opposite side of what is drawn. This strange, mirrored method gives rise to a world that is neither our own nor entirely imagined; it is a fictional space where reality is reversed and folded into itself. And yet, the image remains an extension of my hand, born out of the everyday. Where, exactly, is this picture located? I began to wonder about the existence of a world that does not appear on any of our maps.

Richabelle Aterre is a name I invented. I don’t know where he or she lives. The name emerged from the sound of a work that slipped out from my own process as if asking to be called that. It is a name without meaning. The painting itself also has no grand significance. It was merely a remnant, something that spilled onto the paper from my hand, my eyes, and my tools.

This exhibition is set in the world where Richabelle Aterre resides.

It is not solely an invention of the artist but a journey into a layered world of art where the picture called Richabelle Aterre happened to come into being. As a point of entry into this world, I wrote a short story, something that might give a faint outline of who Aterre is.

Aterre, who exists in the reversed world revealed through the monotype, remains in a state of voicelessness. Beings who dwell in that mirrored world, unseen from our side, do not utter sound. And ‘Pictures,’ by their nature, have no voices to begin with. Gradually, I began to feel, when painting, as though something was pressing down on my voice, keeping it suppressed.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we lived masked lives, our breath muffled, our voices subdued. But even beyond that, in my daily life, there persists a sensation of suppressed utterance, as if I were swallowing sounds before they could even become groans. The subtitle of this exhibition, That Which Utters, That Which Suppresses, reflects this sense of speechlessness and resonates with the inner world of Aterre. The works in this exhibition were made under that same condition.

The relentless hardships of the world persist. And yet, somehow, we are still alive, a condition that feels both strange and precarious. In such times, the universality of art may come into sharper relief, but it, too, seems veiled, subtly restrained by a thin yet heavy curtain drawn over the everyday.

Many places in this world go unnamed on our maps. Across the long arc of history, certain presences have existed as interstitial spaces, like the world inhabited by Aterre. These presences carry within them the capacity to speak, yet they silently swallow hardened mass and fall into silence. I hope to imagine a world in which utterance and suppression are not opposites but part of a single, in-between state.

Some of the works in this exhibition contain feelings I have long kept suppressed. But these paintings are not explanations. They are attempts to express things that have not yet found their way into speech, drawn forth through the act of making, like the picture that Aterre keeps tucked away in a drawer.

Is ‘Picture’ something hanging on the wall in the world of Richabelle Aterre? Or is it hanging in ours?

A painting can be made anytime, anywhere.

But where does the painting truly reside?

And who exactly is looking at it?

By Chie Matsui

May 25, 2025