Shadows and light
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Pinton workshop.
With its selvedge signed by the artist.
Circa 1965.
Matégot, initially a decorator, then a creator of objects and furniture (an activity he abandoned in 1959), met François Tabard in 1945 and gave him his first cartoons, figurative at first, then soon abstract, from the 1950s onwards. He became a member of the APCT (Association of Tapestry Cartoon Painters) in 1949, participated in numerous international exhibitions (Matégot, like Lurçat before him, would be a tireless advocate of tapestry), responded to numerous public commissions, sometimes monumental (“Rouen”, 85 m2 for the Seine-Maritime prefecture, but also tapestries for Orly, for the Maison de la Radio, for the IMF…) and produced no fewer than 629 cartoons up until the 1970s. In 1990, the Matégot Foundation for Contemporary Tapestry was inaugurated in Bethesda, in the United States. Matégot, along with other artists such as Wogensky, Tourlière or Prassinos, was among those who resolutely oriented wool towards abstraction, lyrical at first, geometric in the 70s, by exploiting different technical aspects of the craft: gradients, beating, stitching, dotting…
This tapestry reflects Matégot's preoccupation with the interplay of light and shadow, which he often evokes in his titles (see “Summer Light,” Millon-Robert sale, November 7, 1990, lot 31, reproduced on the catalog cover, and “Light Trap,” held at the Jean Lurçat Museum of Contemporary Tapestry, and reproduced on page 47 of the exhibition catalog). Here, the cartoon is highly contrasted, like a ray of light between two opaque (but flawed) and black (but nuanced) blocks. In fact, all of Matégot's work plays on these transparencies and superimpositions, as if light (though detrimental to his colors) were striving to penetrate the wool.
Provenance: Funds from the Pinton workshop
Bibliography:
Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991
