Matthias Odin: Home AgainGalerie Tator
Lyon, France
Patina refers to the thin oxidised layer, often blue or greenish, covering the surface of objects. It records, stores and physically measures the passage of time through the alteration of matter.
Half-turn patina rolls. Matthias Odin drives through the landscapes of Lyon in his car: Saint-André, Didier, Rembert, Vaise, Villeurbanne. On his journey, he passes the Steinlein and Renault CAT factories, as well as the Calberson exchange platform. These are familiar places where he once lived or worked. Matthias roams the night alone, driving. It is from this floating, almost meditative perspective that things reveal themselves to him; in the landscape, which has become a reservoir of sculptures and images, a playground for memories coming and going.
For the exhibition, the artist took concrete blocks from the ruins of a concert hall in the Gerland district, a few steps away from the Factatory. At first, Matthias did not recognise it. He was unable to locate the space or ‘re-situate’ himself. Yet he used to go there in his twenties with his friends. Further along the road leading back to his village, he stopped in a field in front of some cement globes. These abstract ‘natural’ spheres, weathered and covered in green, evoked certain forms he had already worked with: agglomerated rubber balls, pastiches of stress balls in which personal items, objects or workshop scraps had been embedded.
The sphere calls to the hand. The one we knead to de-stress, to release our tensions; the one we throw to let off steam and which comes back to us the next moment. Matthias' spheres – whether crafted or found – are imbued with the time and spaces they have travelled through. Like a snowball effect, they grow and gain thickness as they are transformed by friction with reality. The sphere rolls, tumbles and becomes a symbol of mental wandering. It traces a looping path made up of returns and convolutions, a circular route in tune with the rhythm of memory.
In fact, Home Again is above all a family story. However, it is not a Home Sweet Home, linked to the comfort of a rediscovered home. Matthias has returned to the place of his childhood. Again. But do we still feel at home in the landscapes we once inhabited? This ‘Again’, while suggesting a return to oneself, is above all a way of taking stock and measuring the gap between what was and what the city - or we - have become. An ‘again’ that is more about distancing oneself and a feeling of strangeness than repetition.
Home, however. For this exhibition, as usual, Matthias has multiplied collaborations according to a logic of collected know-how. This is a way for him to bring the people he cares about into the space of his pieces1. The created object thus becomes the bearer of a broader memory. It materialises an emotional connection that goes beyond simple physical presence – what the object has experienced, the place where it was found, who its owners were.
The artist uses parallax, which is the idea of a change in how we see or view objects. In science, we talk about ‘parallax error’ when someone misreads a measuring instrument (beaker, graduated cylinder, etc.). The principle of parallax induces different ways of perceiving an object depending on our position in relation to it. In Home Again, this concept translates into a form of abstraction and distancing from the intimate. The pieces, placed in containers or display cases lit from within, are transformed into anachronistic objects. These scenes, which have become ‘memorials’ since they are encapsulated, seem to escape their author.
This reversal of the object, which has become almost auratic – suggesting a form of absence or new autonomous life – echoes, more indirectly, the series of photographs taken during his residency. In fact, integrated into the pedestals or intruding into his objects, the photography induces a sense of ‘it has been’. That is, the simultaneous presence of the author and the subject at a given moment. Here, the artist faces his mental landscapes, deserted or reconfigured. It is a way of capturing the state of things, their aura, what has been there.
Finally, in the basement, there is a video of Matthias as a child, perched on a merry-go-round. Another Matthias, the one from before Again. The video was made as part of a campaign to prevent violence against minors2. The child spins to the rhythm of electric guitar samples. A loop, ‘Nowhere’, made from pieces composed when he was 14 years old. The music, haunting, hypnotic, sometimes distressing, accompanies the image of the child and lulls us into the reminiscences of a psyche that is nevertheless unknown. Another ‘nowhere’ or hollow of memory attesting to a reality that escapes us3. The loop plays on, overflowing and recording live the discovery of desire and emotion. The circularity of the merry-go-round, the hypnosis of the loop and the spheres, the sinuosity of the fields and paths, yet another way, far from turning back, of exploring the territory of his memory. Roll, skate, roll.
Eva Foucault, January 2026
1 His grandmother, grandfather, mother, brother, sister and father all contributed directly to the creation of the exhibition pieces, either through their actions or by providing objects. The curtains on the ground floor were sewn by his grandmother, who took care to embed her husband's TCL buttons into them. Matthias's brother made several drawings of hands, displayed in frames painted with the same paint his mother used for her children's bedrooms. His sister's hand can also be found in some of the spheres she kneaded. Sphere, sometimes decorated with his grandfather's crossword puzzles. Finally, some of the photographs belong to Matthias's father's archives.
2 During his childhood and early adolescence, the artist appeared in several advertisements and prevention campaigns as an actor. He kept some videos and photographs of himself as a child in fictional families or surrounded by consumer goods. The video presented in the exhibition is part of his family VHS archives.
3 In fact, the video recorded the moment when Matthias fell in love for the first time. It was with an actress his age, playing the role of a child with him.
