MATHIEU GRODET « PETITES ET GRANDES HISTOIRES » 26/09/2025>09/11/2025

Mathieu Grodet is a cane blower, a chalumist, a cold decorator, a draughtsman, a trainer, an author and a citizen all rolled into one. Driven by the challenges he meets with brio, his work is a testament to our times, while reviving ancestral models and techniques that have fallen into disuse.

His passion for the history of glass allows him to revisit the golden ages of glass. He combines images of modern graphic design with references to the past. The artist creates ‘Venetian-style’ pieces in fine ‘crystallo style’ glass, and decorates them just as finely as the Venetian engravers, evoking diamond-point engraving with his stylograveur. His abundant enamel decorations also seem to have come straight from the brushes of the master decorators of the Renaissance. But on closer inspection, the subjects and the many details (attaché cases, light bulbs, aeroplanes, etc.) are very much contemporary. These are real little stories, settings teeming with anecdotes that tell our history with a critical vision of social, political and cultural issues. The artist presents his vision of the world in the form of poetic decadence.

After studying drawing at the École supérieure d’art et de design of Orléans in 1999, this virtuoso draughtsman discovered the potential of the glass medium. Mathieu Grodet trained in several workshops across France and Europe. He also learned to blow with a cane, and in 2003 became a flame glassmaker at Cerfav, the European centre for research and training in the glassmaking arts in Vannes-le-Châtel (France). Right from the start, his flame-spun glass creations were modelled with suppleness. His first dioramas, in the spirit of the historiated boxes of the 17th century, reveal his talents as a sculptor in scenographies combining humour and memento mori. While reappropriating the style of the Nevers workshops in his ‘Bankster’, a contraction of banker and gangster, he made a societal point by stigmatising the capitalist system. This masterpiece was an opportunity to explore all the techniques involved in flameworking glass and to delve deeper into the design of highly complex murrhines. Mathieu Grodet is one of the rare rediscoverers and practitioners of this ancient technique, forgotten for many centuries.

An obstinate creator, he created an extraordinary version of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. It took the form of a mosaic made up of more than 17,500 letters in murrhines, which took more than three months to complete.

His enamel paintings also demonstrate his dexterity and concern for perfection. Now based in Canada, he regularly travels the world to give lectures and pass on his technical knowledge. His works can be found in prestigious private collections in Europe and North America. They can also be admired at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, the Tacoma Glass Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the European Museum of Modern Glass in Cobourg and the Musée du Verre in Charleroi.