Algae in depths
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Pinton workshop.
With its ribbon signed by the artist, No. 1/6.
Circa 1960.
Matégot, first a decorator, then a creator of objects and furniture (an activity he renounced in 1959), met François Tabard in 1945, and gave him his first cartoons, figurative at first, then soon abstract, from the 50s onwards. He became a member of the A.P.C.T. (Association of Painters-Cartonists of Tapestry) in 1949, participated in multiple international exhibitions (Matégot, like Lurçat before him, was a tireless advocate for tapestry), responded to numerous public commissions, sometimes monumental (« Rouen », 85 m2 for the prefecture of Seine-Maritime, but also tapestries for Orly, for the Maison de la Radio, for the IMF…) and produced no less than 629 cartoons until the 1970s. In 1990, the Matégot Foundation for Contemporary Tapestry was inaugurated in Bethesda, USA. Matégot was part, with other artists like Wogensky, Tourlière or Prassinos, of those who resolutely oriented wool towards abstraction, lyrical at first, geometric in the 1970s, exploiting different technical aspects of the craft: gradients, beatings, stitched, dotted…
The chromatic range "camouflage" announces the artist's later cartoons, but the lyrical treatment between shadows and lights remains characteristic of the mid-60s: if the subject (the seabed) is rare, we find the usual transparency effects rendered by subtle gradations in a limited chromatic range.
Bibliography :
Waldemar Georges, Mathieu Matégot, special issue Prisme des Arts, 1957
Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat and Contemporary Tapestry Museum, 1990-1991
Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014
