In his work as a visual artist, Mathis starts something without knowing where it will lead. His vision is inspired by the history of art and contemporary figures, and his work is always full of irony. "Irony sums up most of my pieces. You can see societal criticism in them, but for me that's not the main purpose. I'm more interested in illustrating a real or unreal story.

Aesthetically, his influences swirl around street art and artists such as Banksy, Slinkachou and Mark Ryden, but for him, it's the theme that takes precedence. Staying focused on a particular figure, a character. The notion of 'character' is predominant in his work. There is always a silhouette, a figure, someone, something that creates the narrative in his work. "If you want to tell a story, you always need characters and a lead actor. With me, it's the characters that come first and then the story is created around them. As his current work shows, Mathis Toussaint is an artist of 'Focalisation'. As in his series on Gellä Fra. Golden Lady, the symbolic figure who directly represents Luxembourg. "I love hijacking this statue. I like viewers to identify with a specific figure". A statue that carries with it a certain presence, a special aura. "When I started working on the subject, I went out and bought a dozen figurines, explaining to the shopkeeper that I was going to make an artistic diversion of them. He was very shocked.
The artist likes to work on iconic figures by hijacking them. In fact, several of his works deal with this Luxembourg emblem, to the extent that the young artist's obsession has become his trademark.
This is reflected in one of his recent exhibitions at the Kulturhuef in Grevenmacher, organised as part of a competition organised by the Ministry of Culture, where he developed a whole body of work around this Monument to Remembrance. "When I exhibit in a place, I like to work with that place and the people who pass through it. My stories are always linked to the place, the context and the region where I install my works. Finally, even if he doesn't consider himself 100 % part of the artistic sphere, preferring to retain his "artistic freedom" and not "adapt to the market", his work leads us to believe that an artist today is simply a creator who questions himself, someone like everyone else, with ideas and dreams. "My greatest desire is never to lose my creativity and always to find a new story to tell".

Through his drawings, paintings, collages, objects and sculptures, Mathis Toussaint illustrates the triviality, irony and seriousness of life - parallel dimensions that provide narrative fodder for the artist's work. Using iconic figures as the basis for his pieces, the Luxembourg artist depicts stories that rarely belong to reality. Born in 1983 in Machtum, on the banks of the Luxembourg Moselle, where he now lives and works, Mathis Toussaint is a native of the region. "The Moselle has always been my favourite place. I'm very attached to this region.

Trained in the visual arts in Strasbourg, it was after his Master's degree that he became a teacher alongside his artistic practice. For the past 8 years, he has been teaching young people art education and art history at the Lycée Aline Mayrisch. It's a job he's passionate about. "I've always loved working with young people. They have a creativity that they are not yet aware of, something sincere that they discover little by little". The artist likes to pass on her knowledge, so that her students are open to the arts. "For me, art is a means of expression, like languages or writing". To sum up his practice, we could say that he takes a multidisciplinary approach, in the sense that the artist practices drawing, sculpture, painting and photography. But paradoxically, while his original work was in abstract and figurative art, today the artist is mainly involved in what he calls 'graphic' art. Nevertheless, his main concern is always to tell the viewer a story, "often surreal stories in which you have to look a little further". I don't want everything to be immediately visible. The viewer has to make up their own interpretation of my work, their own story. This is the nature of his artistic project, which he has aptly named "I tell you stories".