“Levitation”: Mathieu Forget Takes Flight at the Charles Nègre Museum of Photography in Nice
- Delphine & Romain Class
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
With "Levitation", his solo exhibition presented at the Charles Nègre Museum of Photography in Nice, Mathieu Forget delivers one of the major artistic events of the cultural season on the French Riviera. Far more than a simple photography exhibition, this large-scale project offers an immersion into a universe where the laws of physics seem suspended, where movement becomes poetry, and where visitors are invited to rediscover the world from an unexpected perspective.
For more than a decade, Mathieu Forget has developed an instantly recognizable body of work, built around a simple yet infinitely rich idea: capturing that precise instant when the body leaves the ground, when gravity appears to momentarily disappear, and when space and time distort for a fraction of a second.
This suspended moment has become his artistic signature.
In Nice, visitors discover an exceptional retrospective bringing together nearly 80 works, retracing several years of artistic creation and exploration around the world. The exhibition also includes several monumental large-scale works, allowing visitors to literally enter the images and physically experience the sense of vertigo, freedom, and weightlessness that runs throughout his work.
The title "Levitation" feels self-evident. It perfectly summarizes the artist's approach: transcending the constraints of reality in order to open a space for imagination, dreams, and visual poetry.
A Body of Work Built Around Movement
For Mathieu Forget, photography is never simply about freezing a moment in time. On the contrary, it seeks to reveal what usually escapes the human eye: pure movement, fragile balance, and the invisible energy that precedes or accompanies a gesture.
His subjects seem to float above the streets of New York, the rooftops of Paris, Mediterranean beaches, or the frozen landscapes of Antarctica. They move through the image with an almost unreal lightness, as if freed from earthly constraints.
This feeling of absolute freedom is one of the main reasons audiences connect so strongly with his work.
In a world saturated with information, fast-moving images, and constant stimulation, Mathieu Forget's photographs impose a pause. They invite viewers to slow down, observe, and question what is truly possible or impossible.
The artist therefore plays with our perception of reality.
Is it a jump? Is it a fall? Is it a flight?
Ultimately, the answer matters less than the emotion generated by the image.
This ambiguity is what gives his work its richness.
An Immersive Exhibition in the Heart of Nice
The Charles Nègre Museum of Photography provides a particularly fitting setting for this artistic exploration of suspension and movement. The exhibition spaces allow for an ambitious presentation of the works, notably thanks to the presence of numerous large-scale pieces that give the photographs an almost cinematic dimension. Standing before some of these monumental images, visitors experience a physical sensation of movement, as if the action captured by the camera continues beyond the frame itself.
This relationship between the artwork and the viewer's body is one of the exhibition's greatest strengths. The installation also highlights the geographical diversity of Mathieu Forget's work. Cities become visual playgrounds, architecture becomes a compositional partner, and landscapes become stages opening onto infinity. Each photograph therefore emerges as a dialogue between a body, a space, and a fraction of a second.
Significant Institutional Recognition
The Nice exhibition also marks an important milestone in the artist's career.
Long associated with social media and massive digital distribution, Mathieu Forget demonstrates here the power of his images when they regain their original materiality: photographic paper, large formats, and the physical presence of the artwork within an exhibition space. The museum experience profoundly transforms our relationship with images.
Where smartphones impose speed and endless scrolling, museums offer time for contemplation. This encounter between work born partly within the digital ecosystem and the museum institution is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating aspects of the exhibition. It also reflects the evolution of contemporary artistic practices, where the boundaries between digital creation, fine art photography, and contemporary art are becoming increasingly fluid.
Class Art Biarritz: The First to Recognize an Emerging Artist
Long before this institutional and international recognition, certain figures in the art world had already identified the exceptional potential of Mathieu Forget's work. Five years ago, Class Art Biarritz became the first gallery to represent the artist.
At the time, Mathieu Forget had already built a loyal Instagram community, but his audience remained relatively modest compared to the following he enjoys today.
He had approximately 50,000 followers. Today, nearly 700,000 people follow his work, travels, and new creations around the world. This spectacular growth illustrates the scale his visual universe has reached in recent years. Beyond the numbers, however, the encounter with Class Art Biarritz marked an important turning point in the structuring of his artistic career.
The gallery then proposed that he take a new step: transforming some of the images he shared on social media into genuine collector's works through the production of limited-edition photographic prints on paper.
The idea was not entirely new for the artist. Mathieu Forget himself had already been considering this possibility for some time.
How can images born in a digital environment be given a lasting and tangible existence? How can a photograph move from the endless flow of social media to become an artwork intended to endure over time? The gallery's proposal therefore aligned perfectly with reflections already present in the photographer's mind. Looking back, this intuition now appears particularly visionary.
Many of the images that once circulated on Instagram have since become true collector's pieces, sought after as much for their aesthetic qualities as for their importance within the artist's career. This early collaboration also illustrates the essential role galleries play in supporting emerging talents and recognizing new artistic forms.
An Aesthetic Born from the Body
Mathieu Forget's work maintains an intimate relationship with the human body.
Unlike many photographers who use movement merely as a compositional element, he makes it the true subject of his work. The body becomes writing, the jump becomes language, and suspension becomes narrative. This approach finds its roots in his own personal journey, shaped first by sport and later by dance.
This dual culture of movement and gesture probably explains the almost choreographic precision of his compositions. Nothing is left to chance. The angle of the body, the position of the arms, the line of the legs, the direction of the gaze: every detail contributes to the overall balance of the image. The viewer is not simply looking at a photograph. They are witnessing a performance frozen in time.
Victoria Dauberville: Dance as an Artistic Dialogue
It is impossible to speak about Mathieu Forget's universe without mentioning Victoria Dauberville, his partner in life and an accomplished artist whose work naturally resonates with his own aesthetic research. A renowned dancer, Victoria Dauberville brings to this photographic universe an exceptional understanding of movement, rhythm, and space.
Their artistic complicity appears throughout numerous projects where photography meets dance to create images of remarkable poetic intensity.
The technical precision of classical dance merges with the apparent spontaneity of the levitation scenes imagined by Mathieu Forget. This encounter creates a unique visual language situated somewhere between performance, photography, and choreography.
Victoria Dauberville has also developed her own artistic career through the show "Classique", a creation that revisits the great codes of ballet and choreographic tradition with intelligence and modernity.
The performance explores the beauty of academic movement while placing it firmly within a contemporary sensibility. It reflects the same search for elegance, the same attention to the line of the body, and the same desire to make an artistic language sometimes perceived as elitist accessible to a wider audience.
The proximity between the two artists' universes feels almost self-evident. One works with the suspension of the body within the image. The other with its musicality in space.
One captures the moment. The other extends it through movement.
Together, they participate in the same reflection on grace, balance, and freedom.
Biography of Mathieu Forget
Photographer, creative director, and image-maker, Mathieu Forget has established himself as one of the most original figures in contemporary French photography.
Known under the names Forgetmat and The Flying Man, he has spent more than ten years developing a body of work centered on the relationship between the body and gravity.
His instantly recognizable style quickly earned him international visibility.
His photographs circulate worldwide and enjoy considerable success on digital platforms. Yet reducing his work solely to his popularity on social media would be a mistake. Behind the visual impact of his images lies a genuine artistic reflection on time, movement, and space. His works challenge the limits of reality. They propose another way of inhabiting the world.
They remind us that art still possesses the rare ability to inspire wonder.
Over the years, Mathieu Forget has collaborated with numerous institutions, brands, and international publications while maintaining a demanding and coherent personal artistic practice. Today, his work can be found both in private collections and in exhibition spaces and cultural institutions.
An Exhibition That Marks a Milestone
With "Levitation", the Charles Nègre Museum of Photography celebrates not only an artist but also a new way of thinking about contemporary photography. A photography that engages with dance. A photography that engages with digital culture. A photography that engages with the body.
The exhibition reflects the remarkable journey accomplished by Mathieu Forget in only a few years: from a creator sharing images with a few tens of thousands of followers to an internationally recognized artist followed by hundreds of thousands of people and now celebrated in a museum dedicated to the history and future of photography. The path travelled has been considerable.
Yet when observing these silhouettes suspended in mid-air, these bodies defying gravity, and these images that seem forever to seek a more distant horizon, one conclusion becomes inevitable: for Mathieu Forget, the journey has probably only just begun.
Discover the works of Mathieu Forget available through Class Art Biarritz.
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