Mathieu Devavry, also known as “MATI”, is a French multidisciplinary artist born in 1981. With over 25 years of artistic practice, his work explores painting, sculpture, installation, performance, street art, scenography, video, and participatory practices. Based in Cyprus since 2014, he has become an active figure in the Cypriot cultural landscape through numerous collaborations, exhibitions, festivals, and intercultural projects.
Trained at the École Blot in France and in sculpture at the Aline Ozenfant studio, Mathieu develops a personal artistic language deeply influenced by nature, organic forms, memory, and human interaction. His childhood spent in the forest of Faux de Verzy in Champagne continues to shape his visual universe, where abstraction and organic structures coexist in constant transformation.]
His work explores the relationship between humanity, environment, and collective memory through raw and hybrid materials such as earth, plaster, wood, sea-polished glass, painting, sound, and digital media. Through immersive installations and performances, he investigates resilience, transformation, and the fragile balance between nature and contemporary society.
From 2006 to 2010, Mathieu developed numerous collaborations with galleries and international artists, participating in exhibitions, studio projects, and artistic masterclasses in France and Spain. His practice also expanded into monumental public artworks and long-term street-art projects in Cyprus, strengthening his interest in collaborative and multidisciplinary approaches to contemporary art.
In parallel to his personal practice, Mathieu develops participatory and educational methodologies through workshops and collaborative projects involving children, migrants, refugees, and local communities. He also collaborates with various NGOs on artistic and social projects, using recycling, collective creation, and interventions in public space as tools for dialogue, awareness, and engagement.
He also works on engaged projects, notably “Under the Tents (It’s still raining)”, a participatory artistic initiative in public space developed within a social and collaborative framework.
https://www.instagram.com/under.thetentsstillraining/?hl=fr
Approximately every five years, he develops hybrid “one-shot” creations combining dance, choreography, visual arts, and poetry. These unique performances generate video and/or physical traces, inscribing the work into an ephemeral yet documented temporal cycle.
His current practice continues the project “Anastomose”, initiated in 2022, and opens into a new research line titled “Généalogie en devenir”. This approach explores filiation, transformation, and the deconstruction of origins, questioning how identities, materials, and narratives constantly recombine. Through evolving works, he develops a language where forms detach from fixed lineage and enter a continuous process of mutation, hybridization, and reinvention.
Since 2022, he has been Cultural Officer at the Institut français de Chypre, where he curates and develops numerous projects highlighting contemporary French creation in Cyprus. He is also the initiator of several independent artistic projects and festivals dedicated to ecology, digital cultures, performance, and emerging artistic practices.
Today, he is represented in Cyprus by Diatopos Contemporary Art Centre and will present his work in May 2026 at the Vima Art Fair.
His artistic universe is built on experimentation, collaboration, and a constant reinvention of forms, materials, and narratives.
