Bianco su Bianco (2025) by Matisse Mesnil stands at the intersection of the artist’s metalwork practice and fine art printmaking: a matrix made through welding transferred onto the sheet through embossing. As Mesnil observes “Metal is an aggressive material; the idea of making a flower creates a contradiction, a passage.” The floral subject emerges solely through relief, without the use of color, relying on the interplay of light, shadow, and surface. In contrast to the dark tones and compact materiality of Mesnil’s metal works, Bianco su Bianco foregrounds the delicacy and smoothness of the untouched white sheet. “This work is the negative of something hard”: the force of welding is reversed into an imprint, generating a formal tension between hardness and tactile sensitivity.

Matisse Mesnil (1989) is a French-Italian artist based in Paris. Positioned between craftsmanship and industry, Matisse Mesnil has developed a body of technical and methodological experimentation centred on his material of choice: metal.

Through practices such as welding and grinding, the artist reworks the means of figuration within its most traditional genres, including landscape and still life, while his research is accompanied by an increasingly abstract vocabulary that approaches the language of minimalism.